I had inherited a plentiful lack of musical genius from my Mother, who had neither ear nor voice, and who had said, in the course of her last illness, ‘I shall sing His praise, at length, in strains I never could master here below’. My Father, on the other hand, had some knowledge of the principles of vocal music, although not, I am afraid, much taste. He had at least great fondness for singing hymns, in the manner then popular with the Evangelicals, very loudly, and so slowly that I used to count how many words I could read, silently, between one syllable of the singing and another. My lack of skill did not prevent me from being zealous at these vocal exercises, and my Father and I used to sing lustily together. The Wesleys, Charlotte Elliott (‘Just as I am without one plea’) and James Montgomery (‘For ever with the Lord’) represented his predilection in hymnology. I acquiesced, but that would not have been my independent choice. These represented the devotional verse which made its direct appeal to the evangelical mind, and served in those ‘Puseyite’ days to counteract the High Church poetry founded on ‘The Christian Year’. Of that famous volume I never met with a copy until I was grown up, and equally unknown in our circle were the hymns of Newman, Faber and Neale. << less