yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man's mind to

recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say

something of myself;--nor, without doing so, should I know how to

throw my matter into any recognised and intelligible form. That I,

or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible.

Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there

that has done none? But this I protest:--that nothing that I say

shall be untrue. I will set down naught in malice; nor will I give

to myself, or others, honour which I do not believe to have been

fairly won. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young

gentleman could well be, my misfortunes arising from a mixture of

poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an

utter want on my part of the juvenile manhood which enables some

boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such

a position is sure to produce.

I was born in 1815, in Keppel Street, Russell Square; and while a

baby, was carried down to Harrow, where my father had built a house

on a large farm which, in an evil hour he took on a long lease from

Lord Northwick. That farm was the grave of all my father's hopes,

ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother's sufferings, and

of those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny

and of ours. My father had been a Wykamist and a fellow of New

College, and Winchester was the destination of my brothers and

myself; but as he had friends among the masters at Harrow, and as

the school offered an education almost gratuitous to children living

in the parish, he, with a certain aptitude to do things differently