As Richard developed in his love for literature, his thinking began to take the form of verse-making. His solitary walks facilitated his poetry, whether he produced anything of original value or not. Expressing oneself aids growth, which is the prime necessity of human as of all other life. It is the privilege of some kinds of labour to be compatible with thoughts of higher things. At the bookkeeper’s desk the clerk must think of nothing but his work—he is chained to it as the galley slave to his oar. But the shoemaker may be poet or mystic, or both. The ploughman may turn a good furrow and a good verse together. And Richard could use both hands and thoughts together. It troubled his parents that they could not send him to the university, but they had determined that he must at least be a grown man, capable of looking after his own affairs, when the first step in that direction was taken.

John Tuke was one of those who acknowledge some need to be kind toward his neighbour, but assert ignorance of any one who must be worshiped. And in truth, the God presented to him by his teachers was not one worthy of the least claim of devotion. The religious system brought to bear on his youth had operated but feebly on his conscience and not at all on his emotions. By the time he was an adult he believed himself satisfied that the notion of religion—of duty toward an unseen maker—was but an old wives’ fable.

The testimony of his senses, which saw and heard and felt nothing of the supposed hereafter, he accepted as stronger evidence than any amount of assertion by priests and believers. The world was around him—some things he must believe, other things no man could!

One thing only was clear—every man was bound to give his neighbour fair play! He would press nothing upon Richard as to God or no God. He would not be dogmatic! He only wanted to make a man of him. And was he not so far successful? Was not Richard growing up as a diligent, honest fellow, loving books and leading a good life rather than, as a so-called “gentleman,” becoming arrogant and unjust, despising the poor, and caring about nothing but himself? In the midst of such superior causes of satisfaction, it also pleased Tuke to reflect that the trade he had taught him was a clean one, which, while it rendered him superior to any shrewd trick fortune might play him, would not make his hands unlike those of a gentleman.

His mother, however, kept wishing that Richard were better “set up,” and that he looked more like his grandfather the blacksmith, whose trade she regarded as manlier than that of her husband’s. Hence she had long cherished the desire that he should spend some time with her father. John, however, would not hear of it.

“He will get to working at the forge,” he said, “and ruin his hands for the delicate art in which he is now so gifted.”