obably have enrolled his
own. That, however, was not our destiny. My grandfather had only one
child, and nature had disqualified him, from his cradle, for the busy
pursuits of men.

A pale, pensive child, with large dark brown eyes, and flowing hair,
such as may be beheld in one of the portraits annexed to these volumes,
had grown up beneath this roof of worldly energy and enjoyment,
indicating even in his infancy, by the whole carriage of his life, that
he was of a different order from those among whom he lived. Timid,
susceptible, lost in reverie, fond of solitude, or seeking no better
company than a book, the years had stolen on, till he had arrived at
that mournful period of boyhood when eccentricities excite attention and
command no sympathy. In the chapter on Predisposition, in the most
delightful of his works,[1] my father has drawn from his own, though his
unacknowledged feelings, immortal truths. Then commenced the age of
domestic criticism. His mother, not incapable of deep affections, but so
mortified by her social position that she lived until eighty without
indulging in a tender expression, did not recognise in her only
offspring a being qualified to control or vanquish his impending fate.
His existence only served to swell the aggregate of many humiliating
particulars. It was not to her a source of joy, or sympathy, or solace.
She foresaw for her child only a future of degradation. Having a strong,
clear mind, without any imagination, she believed that she beheld an
inevitable doom. The tart remark and the contemptuous comment on her
part, elicited, on the other, all the irritability of the poetic
idiosyncrasy. After frantic ebullitions, for which, when the
circumstances were analysed by an ordinary mind, there seemed no
sufficient cause, my grandfather always interfered to soothe with
good-tempered commonplaces, and promote peace. He was a man who thought
that the only way to make people happy was to make them a present. He
took it for granted that a boy in a passion wanted a toy or a guinea. At
a later date, when my father ran away from home, and after some
wanderings was brought back, found lying on a tombstone in Hackney
churchyard, he embraced him, and gave him a pony.

In this state of affairs, being sent to school in the neighbourhood, was
a rather agreeable incident. The school was kept by a Scotchman, one
Morison, a good man, and not untinctured with scholarship, and it is
possible that my fathe