my-surgeon, whose son James, even after he had been sent to
Sandhurst for his education, continued still to visit Chatham from time
to time. He had a turn for private theatricals; and as his father's
quarters were in the ordnance hospital there, a great rambling place
otherwise at that time almost uninhabited, he had plenty of room in
which to get up his entertainments. The staff-doctor himself played his
part, and his portrait will be found in _Pickwick_.

By Lamert, I have often heard him say, he was first taken to the
theatre at the very tenderest age. He could hardly, however, have been
younger than Charles Lamb, whose first experience was of having seen
_Artaxerxes_ when six years old; and certainly not younger than Walter
Scott, who was only four when he saw _As You Like It_ on the Bath stage,
and remembered having screamed out, _Ain't they brothers?_ when
scandalized by Orlando and Oliver beginning to fight.[3] But he was at
any rate old enough to recollect how his young heart leaped with terror
as the wicked king Richard, struggling for life against the virtuous
Richmond, backed up and bumped against the box in which he was; and
subsequent visits to the same sanctuary, as he tells us, revealed to him
many wondrous secrets, "of which not the least terrific were, that the
witches in _Macbeth_ bore an awful resemblance to the thanes and other
proper inhabitants of Scotland; and that the good king Duncan couldn't
rest in his grave, but was constantly coming out of it and calling
himself somebody else."

During the last two years of Charles's residence at Chatham, he was sent
to a school kept in Clover Lane by the young Baptist minister already
named, Mr. William Giles. I have the picture of him here, very strongly
in my mind, as a sensitive, thoughtful, feeble-bodied little boy, with
an unusual sort of knowledge and fancy for such a child, and with a
dangerous kind of wandering intelligence that a teacher might turn to
good or evil, happiness or misery, as he directed it. Nor does the
influence of Mr. Giles, such as it was, seem to have been other than
favorable. Charles had himself a not ungrateful sense in after-years
that this first of his masters, in his little-cared-for childhood, had
pronounced him to be a boy of capacity; and when, about half-way through
the publication of _Pickwick_, his old teacher sent a silver snuff-box
with admiring inscription to the "inimitable Boz," it reminded him of
praise far more