The Leaves of the Tree Author:Arthur Christopher Benson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill HENEY SIDGWICK Henry Sidgwick was born in 1838, the son of a clergyman, Headmaster of Skipton Grammar School. His grandfather, William Sidgwick, was a ... more »self-made man, a wealthy cotton-spinner, who had married a Miss Benson; and thus my father, Archbishop Benson, was Henry Sidgwick's second cousin. The other members of the family who survived infancy were William Carr Sidgwick, formerly Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, Arthur Sidgwick, a Rugby Master, and later Tutor of Corpus College, Oxford, and my mother. There was a marked intellectual bent in the whole clan. I once made out a careful record of their performances. I forget now the exact details, but I think that it came out that something like twelve members of the united families had taken first-classes at the University, and that over twenty of them had published books of some kind oranother. I sent the particulars to Sir Francis Galton, in answer to one of his circulars, and he replied that it was the most remarkable case of kindred aptitude that had ever come under his notice. Henry Sidgwick was at school at Kugby, where his widowed mother resided. He was not proficient in athletics, and lived a rather secluded school-life, with the background of a very happy home-Circle. My father was then a Rugby Master, and lived with the Sidgwicks. Henry Sidgwick went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of seventeen, as a Scholar. Though he had a year of ill-health, he came out as Senior Classic and a Wrangler. He was elected to a Fellowship at Trinity, and took up the study of Moral Philosophy. He held a College Lectureship, and was eventually made Professor of Moral Philosophy. He married in 1876 a sister of Mr. Arthur Balfour, and he died in 1900, at the age of sixty-two, after a brief illness. Such is t...« less