precious obtained by him at his first year's examination
in the Clover Lane academy, when his recitation of a piece out of the
_Humorist's Miscellany_ about Doctor Bolus had received, unless his
youthful vanity bewildered him, a double encore. A habit, the only bad
one taught him by Mr. Giles, of taking for a time, in very moderate
quantities, the snuff called Irish blackguard, was the result of this
gift from his old master; but he abandoned it after some few years, and
it was never resumed.

It was in the boys' playing-ground near Clover Lane in which the school
stood, that, according to one of his youthful memories, he had been, in
the hay-making time, delivered from the dungeons of Seringapatam, an
immense pile "(of haycock)," by his countrymen the victorious British
"(boy next door and his two cousins)," and had been recognized with
ecstasy by his affianced one "(Miss Green)," who had come all the way
from England "(second house in the terrace)" to ransom and marry him. It
was in this playing-field, too, as he has himself recorded, he first
heard in confidence from one whose father was greatly connected, "being
under government," of the existence of a terrible banditti called _the
radicals_, whose principles were that the prince-regent wore stays, that
nobody had a right to any salary, and that the army and navy ought to be
put down; horrors at which he trembled in his bed, after supplicating
that the radicals might be speedily taken and hanged. Nor was it the
least of the disappointments of his visit in after-life to the scenes of
his boyhood that he found this play-field had been swallowed up by a
railway station. It was gone, with its two beautiful trees of hawthorn;
and where the hedge, the turf, and all the buttercups and daisies had
been, there was nothing but the stoniest of jolting roads.

He was not much over nine years old when his father was recalled from
Chatham to Somerset House, and he had to leave this good master, and the
old place endeared to him by recollections that clung to him afterwards
all his life long. It was here he had made the acquaintance not only of
the famous books that David Copperfield specially names, of _Roderick
Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Humphrey Clinker_, _Tom Jones_, the _Vicar
of Wakefield_, _Don Quixote_, _Gil Blas_, _Robinson Crusoe_, the
_Arabian Nights_, and the _Tales of the Genii_, but also of the
_Spectator_, the _Tatler_, the _Idler_, the _Citizen of the World_, a