living in Burnley with their mother.

Burnley is now a large manufacturing town of seventy thousand
inhabitants, but in those days it was just rising in importance, and a
few years earlier it had been a small country town in an uncommonly
aristocratic neighborhood. The gate of Towneley Park opens now almost
upon the town itself, and in former times there were many other seats of
the greater or lesser squires within a radius of a very few miles. It is
a common mistake in the south of England to suppose that Lancashire is a
purely commercial county. There are, or were in my youth, some very
aristocratic neighborhoods in Lancashire, and that immediately about
Burnley was one of them. The creation of new wealth, and the extinction
or departure of a few families, may have altered its character since
then, but in the days of my grandfather nobody thought of disputing the
supremacy of the old houses. There was something almost sublime in the
misty antiquity of the Towneley family, one of the oldest in all
England, and still one of the wealthiest, keeping house in its venerable
castellated mansion in a great park with magnificent avenues. Other
houses of less wealth and more modern date had their pedigrees in the
history of Lancashire.

My grandfather, Gilbert Hamerton, possessed an old gabled mansion with a
small but picturesque estate, divided from Towneley Park by a public
road, and he had other property in the town and elsewhere enough to make
him independent, but not enough to make him one of the great squires.
However, as he was the second son of an ancient Yorkshire family, and as
pedigrees and quarterings counted for something in those comparatively
romantic times, the somewhat exclusive aristocracy about Burnley had
received him with much cordiality from the first, and he continued all
his life to belong to it. His comparative poverty was excused by a