It struck him as being truth itself--illuminating like
the sun. He adopted it devoutly. He bored me with it sometimes. Once,
just to shut him up, I asked quietly if this theory which he regarded as
so incontrovertible did not cause him some uneasiness about his wife and
the dear girls? He transfixed me with a pitying stare and requested me
in his deep solemn voice to remember the "well-established fact" that
genius was not transmissible.
I said only "Oh! Isn't it?" and he thought he had silenced me by an
unanswerable argument. But he continued to talk of his glorious father-
in-law, and it was in the course of that conversation that he told me
how, when the Liverpool relations of the poet's late wife naturally
addressed themselves to him in considerable concern, suggesting a
friendly consultation as to the boy's future, the incensed (but always
refined) poet wrote in answer a letter of mere polished _badinage_ which
offended mortally the Liverpool people. This witty outbreak of what was
in fact mortification and rage appeared to them so heartless that they
simply kept the boy.
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