t I profess myself broad, and wide, and liberal
enough for all manner of allowances to others, and so far as any narrow
prejudices may be imagined of my idiosyncrasy, I must allow myself to be
changeable and uncertain--though hitherto having steered through life a
fairly straight course--and that sometimes I can even doubt as to my
politics, whether they should be defined Whig or Tory; as to my
religion, whether it is most truly chargeable by the epithet high or
low; as to my likings, whether I best prefer solitude or society; as to
literature, whether gaieties or gravities please me most. In fact, I
recognise good in everything, though sometimes hidden by evil, right (by
intention, at least) in sundry doctrines and opinions otherwise to my
judgment wrong, and I am willing to believe the kindliest of my
opponents who appear to be honest and earnest. This is a very fair creed
for a citizen of the world, whose motto is Terence's famous avowal,
"Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto."

CHAPTER II.

INFANCY AND SCHOOLDAYS.

In a short and simple way, then, and without any desire ostentatiously
to "chronicle small beer," as Iago sneers it, I suppose it proper to
state very briefly when and where I was born, with a word as to my
parentage. July 17, 1810, was my birthday, and No. 20 Devonshire Place,
Marylebone, my birthplace, at that time the last house of London
northward. My father, Martin Tupper, a name ever honoured by me, was an
eminent medical man, who twice refused a baronetcy (first from Lord
Liverpool, and secondly, as offered by the Duke of Wellington); my
mother, Ellin Devis Marris, being daughter of Robert Marris, a good
landscape artist, of an old Lincolnshire family, and made the heiress,
as adopted child, of her aunt, Mrs. Ellin Devis, of Devonshire Place and
Albury.

My father's family have sojourned 336 years in Guernsey, having migrated
thither from Thuringia, _via_ Hesse Cassel, owing to religious
persecution in the evil days of Charles V., our remote ancestors being
styled Von Topheres (chieftains, or head-lords) of Treffurth (as is
recorded in the heraldic MSS. of the British Museum), that being the
origin of our name.

Of my mother's family (in old time Maris, as "of the sea," with mermaids
for heraldry), I have the commissions of one who was an Ironside
cavalry officer, signed by Cromwell and Fairfax; and several of her
relatives (besides her father) were distinguished artists. In
part