Peter, a clergyman’s son, the only child of a late marriage, was born in ‘92. To his father's superlatively unstable career and change from place to place, he attributed not only his own tendency to gyrovagrancy—but the passion for nature, for the elemental, for width of vision, for adventure in human contingency that for him was character and fate. For the parsonages in which his childhood was spent looked in rapid turn on the watery business of the Mersey, the chimney stacks of Birmingham, the ivied fragments and vistaed landscape of Hazelcrom, on Yorkshire moors, and the expanse of tidal flood at Southampton. The Reverend Walter Michaelham, a rebel spirit clad picturesquely in Pauline pate and beard, with haggard, restless eyes, might in other circumstances have been an anarchist. But the temperamental egotism, irritibility, energy and heroic generosity that might (half a century later) have been enlisted by Socialism and Revolution found vent in a rebellious Evangelicanism. At Oxford as a young man, he was a fierce opponent of the Oxford movement, then for most a living memory. Evangelical reaction was gaining strength and the prospect of discrediting Tractarianism captured his imagination. Pusey a ghost from sad years appeared infrequently in the pulpit, amongst the rising generation, at least, a diminishing influence, a robed stooping figure, going to and fro the Cathedral, and little more. Wilberforce was in a weak way. Jowett professed Greek, Arnold poetry. With the latter many of the rising generation professed affinity. And there were those of exploratory and dialectic turn of mind to whom the legacy of Whately was a stronger appeal than the teaching of Keble or Pusey.