" Of his two
sisters, one was well read and agreeably talkative, noted by
Thackeray as the cleverest woman he had ever met; the other, Mrs.
Acton, was a delightful old esprit fort, as I knew her in the
sixties, "pagan, I regret to say," but not a little resembling her
brother in the point and manner of her wit. The family moved in
his infancy to an old-fashioned handsome "Wilton House," adjoining
closely to the town, but standing amid spacious park-like grounds,
and inhabited in after years by Kinglake's younger brother
Hamilton, who succeeded his uncle in the medical profession, and
passed away, amid deep and universal regret, in 1898. Here during
the thirties Sydney Smith was a frequent and a welcome visitor; it
was in answer to old Mrs. Kinglake that he uttered his audacious
mot on being asked if he would object, as a neighbouring clergyman
had done, to bury a Dissenter: "Not bury Dissenters? I should
like to be burying them all day!"
Taunton was an innutrient foster-mother, arida nutrix, for such
young lions as the Kinglake brood. Two hundred years before it had
been a prosperous and famous place, its woollen and kersey trades,
with the population they supported, ranking it as eighth in order
among English towns.
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