Martin Tupper's Autobiography

MY LIFE

AS AN AUTHOR

BY

MARTIN FARQUHAR TUPPER
D.C.L.  F.R.S.

Viri, vivo, vivam.

LONDON:

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON
CROWN BUILDINGS, 188 FLEET STREET, E.C.
1886
[All rights reserved]

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CONTENTS.

CHAPTER I. Preliminary—Sonnet—Public Life, not Private—Benjamin Franklin—Samples from Books—Self-judgment 1-6 CHAPTER II. Infancy and Schooldays—Parentage—Germany and Guernsey, America and Canada—Winsor's Patent Gaslights—King George III.'s Blessing—My Father's Dream—Second Sight—Heredity—First School at Brentford—Next at Brook Green—Third Charterhouse—Dr. Russell—Parson Schoolmasters—Coins and Hoops—Andrew Irvine—Cockshies—Harpies at the Feast—Dr. Stocker—Holt's—M'Neile—Harold Browne 7-25 CHAPTER III. Young Authorship in Verse and Prose—Melite—Rough Rhymes—Carthage—Umbrella Sapphics—Height of Honesty—Holkar Hall—Melrose Abbey—Heidelberg—Pterodactyles—The Buckstone—Scotch Journal—Vitrified Forts—Ireland—Kingston Caverns—Cornish Letter and Sketches—Penzance—The Logan—Land's End—St. Michael's Mount—Rapid Travel 26-51 CHAPTER IV. College Days—Voice from the Cloister—Gladstone—Aristotle Class—Giants in those Days—Studentship—A Reading-Man—College Larks—D.C.L.—Dr. Bliss 52-61 CHAPTER V. Failure as to Orders—Stammering—Blewbury Vicarage—Lincoln's Inn—Lewin's Critique—Brodie's Cacography—Inkpen's Entomology—Duke of Wellington—Walters'—Letter as to India—Barrister and Benedict—A Hoax—Theodore Hook—Old Lady Cork 62-71 CHAPTER VI. Stammering—Man's Privilege of Speech—Chess Playing—Anecdotes—Angling—Fishing Sonnets 72-78 CHAPTER VII. Oxford Prize Poems—Verses in the Schools—Parodies—Rhyme and Rhythm—Scriptural Science—Classic Parallels 79-85 CHAPTER VIII. Sundry Providences—The Small Semisuicide—A Concussion—Horse Accidents—Perils by Land and Sea—Lydstep Cavern 86-89 CHAPTER IX. Yet more Escapes—White Cross Guild—Evils and Temptations—Potipheras—Heresies—Creeds 90-94 CHAPTER X. Fads and Fancies—Vegetarian—Teetotalism—The Anglo-Saxon—Opera Colonnade—Moderation—America Revisited—Poem on Temperance and Total Abstinence—Gough—Dr. Hodgkin—A Martyr—Clerical Letter on Pharisaism 95-104 CHAPTER XI. Sacra Poesis—Geraldine—Critiques—John and Tom Hughes—Donnington Priory—Little Providences 105-110 CHAPTER XII. Origin of "Proverbial Philosophy"—M'Neile and Stebbing—N. P. Willis—Harrison Ainsworth—Hatchard's—Moxon's—Cassell's—A Prophecy—My Father's Letter and Gift—Sixty Times—Politeuphuia—Parallels—Mr. Orton's Volume—American Laudations, and English—As to per contra—Copyright Question—Wedding Gifts—An Elizabethan Author—Seldom Seen, and Few Adventures 111-133 CHAPTER XIII. A Modern Pyramid—The Vision—A Fearful Flight—Imagination—The Crystal Cubes and Mud Bricks—Sonnets and Sonneteering—Mackay and Shakespeare's 134-144 CHAPTER XIV. An Author's Mind—Prefatory Ramble—Addled Eggs—The Mental Cathedral—Probabilities—Job's Trials 145-152 CHAPTER XV. The Crock of Gold—Dramatised in Boston and London—Origin of the Story—The Twins—Heart: drawn from Living Models—Critiques from Ollier and St. John 153-158 CHAPTER XVI. Æsop Smith—Mudie's—Rabelaisian Hints—The Early Gallop—Alfred, or Albert Order—Fables 159-162

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@17558@[email protected]#CHAPTER_XVII" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER XVII. Stephan Langton—King Alfred's Poems—The Silent Pool—Hard Reading for the History—The Book still in Print—Curious Metrical Translation of Anglo-Saxon Poetry—The Jubilee at Wantage and at Liverpool 163-169 CHAPTER XVIII. Shakespeare Commemoration—Lord Carlisle—Lord Houghton, Leigh Court—Stratford Church—The Baptismal Font—An American Autograph Hunter—Sonnet 170-172 CHAPTER XIX. Translations and Pamphlets—Homer, lib. A.—Tennyson's Vivien—Classical Versions—Hymn for All Nations—Protestant Ballads—Fifteen Pamphlets 173-179 CHAPTER XX. Paterfamilias's Diary—Courier Pierre—Devil's Bridge—Major Hely—Guernsey—The Haro that saved Castle Cornet—Night-Sail in the Race of Alderney—Durham's Statue of Prince Albert—Isle of Man—King Orry—Walter Montgomery—Bishop Powys 180-189 CHAPTER XXI. Never Give Up, at Dr. Kirkland's—Harvest Hymns—Gordon Ballads—The Good Earl—John Brown—My Brother—Memory—Evil not Endless 190-199 CHAPTER XXII. Protestant Ballads—"So help me, God!"—Nun's Appeal, &c. 200-203 CHAPTER XXIII. Plays—Alfred—Raleigh—Washington—Twelve Scenes—Family Records 204-207 CHAPTER XXIV. Antiquariana—Lockhart and my Coin Article in the Quarterly—Farley Finds—Mummy Wheat and Faraday 208-212 CHAPTER XXV. Honours—Times' Letter—A Peerage and Baronetcy—Prussian Medal and Chevalier Bunsen's Letter—Authorship a Rank by Itself—Many Inventions and Literary Discoveries, as Punch, Humpty Dumpty, 666, &c. 213-220 CHAPTER XXVI. Courtly: Prophetic Sonnet on our Empress—Many Royal Poems—Modern Court Suit v. Queen Anne's—A Greeting to Prince Albert Victor 221-228 CHAPTER XXVII. F.R.S.—Lord Melbourne's Carelessness—Spectrum Analysis—Spiritualism—Vivisection—Painted Windows—Parabolic Teaching 229-233 CHAPTER XXVIII. Personation—Bignor—The Greyhound—Alibis—A Rescue on Snowdon—Fraudulent Collections—Forged Authorials—Boston Unitarianism—Pictures Falsely Signed 234-237 CHAPTER XXIX. Hospitalities—Farnham Castle—Orchids and Pines—Bishop Sumner—Garibaldi at Gladstone's—Parham and Curzon—Ghosts—Purple Parchments—Uncut Elzevirs—Shenstone's Leasowes—"Little Testy"—Sonnet—Isle of Wight—Sojourns—City Feasts—Ostentatious Hospitality 238-244 CHAPTER XXX. Social and Rural—No Scandals—Hawthorne's Visit—Alexander Smith's—Jerdan's Haycock—Otto Goldschmidt and Macdougall—Dark Visitors—Liberian Gold Medal—Noviomagians—Lucky Angling—Albury Waltz—Rustic Stupidity—Redmen—The Drinking Fountain—Our House a Hive of Bees—Foxhunt in Drawing-room—The Donkey Burglar—Anthony Devis—Irvingism 245-256 CHAPTER XXXI. American Ballads: "Ho, Brother! I'm a Britisher"—The Quasi-Inspiration—"Thirty Noble Nations," and Thirty-three—Many Others—Ground-baiting the Transatlantic 257-259 CHAPTER XXXII. First American Visit—Too Temperate for 1851; not Temperate enough for 1876—Grand Dinner at Baltimore, and Great Speech—The Astor Dinner—"Amice Davis"—Mayor Kingsland and the Mile-long Procession—Willis, at Golden Square—The Fillmore Dinner at the White House—Jenny Lind's Concert—Gordon Bennet—Squier—Barnum 260-270 CHAPTER XXXIII. Second American Visit—Extreme Gold—Talmage—Bryant—Cooper—"Immortality" at the Tabernacle—Lotus Club—Lord Rosebery—Dr. Levis—Mr. Pettit's Portrait—The Listers at Hamilton—Toronto—Sir Charles Tupper—Elgin—Dufferin—Mackay and Sleighing—Dawson and Eozoa—Vaughan-Tuppers—The Grand John Hopkins' Banquet—Charleston Tuppers—My Palinode to the South—Visit to Williams Middleton—Parting Stanzas—Ruined Mansion—Valete 271-280

href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@17558@[email protected]#CHAPTER_XXXIV" class="pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">CHAPTER XXXIV. English and Scotch Readings, very rapid, from Isle of Wight to Peterhead—My Entrepreneur D.: his Experiences: I Failed with Him, but Succeeded Alone—Specimen of Readings—Local Critiques—Many Friends Unrecorded—Miscellaneous Poems—Mr. Gall's Primeval Man—Arbroath—Mill the Atheist—Mr. Boyd's Piety—Hamilton Mausoleum—Wild Cattle—Burns's Country—James Baird the Millionaire and the Hodman 281-288 CHAPTER XXXV. Electrics—Sir Culling Eardley at Erith—Atlantic Telegraph—The First Message—Meddlesome Revisers—Antique Telegraphy—Addison and Strada—Professor Morse—A Telegram-Sonnet 289-295 CHAPTER XXXVI. The Rifle, a Patriotic Prophecy in 1845—Early Pamphlet—Defence not Defiance—Albury Club—Blackheath Review—Lord Lovelace—Alarums—Drummond's Scare—A Lucky Shot 296-303 CHAPTER XXXVII. Autographs and Advertisements—Worth Eighteenpence each—A Hundred at Once—Photographs—Oil Paintings—Locks of Hair—Interviewers—Puffs and Anti-puffs 304-311 CHAPTER XXXVIII. Kindness to Animals—Louis Napoleon and Alfort—Vivisection—Pontrilas Court—The Omnibus Hack—Divers Ballads 312-315 CHAPTER XXXIX. Orkney and Shetland—Our Voyage—Wick Herring Fair—Balfour at Shapinshay—Kirkwall—Aytoun—Gulf Stream—Snuff-Boxes and Corals—Fair Isle Hosiery—Stennis—Scalloway—Lerwick Literature—Artificial Flora—Thurso Castle—Robert Dick—Cape Wrath—Stornoway—Callanish—Pipers—The brooch of Lorne, &c. 316-321 CHAPTER XL. Literary Friends—Mrs. Somerville, Miss Granville, Mrs. Jameson, Mrs. Beecher Stowe, Ouida, Miss Braddon, Mrs. Carter Hall, Mrs. Grote, Lady Wilde, Miss Mackay, Rogers, Carlyle, Haweis, Tennyson, Browning, Mortimer Collins, Dickens and Son, Owen, Austen, Pengelley, Bowerbank, S. Mackenzie, M. Arnold, S. Brooks, Albert Smith, Mark Lemon, Tenniel, Cooper, P. B. Cole, E. Yates, Frank Smedley, J. G. Wood, Cuthbert Collingwood, Mr. and Mrs. Zerffi, Birch, Miss Hooper, Miss Barlee, G. MacDonald, Ronald Gower, Fred. Burnaby, Charles Marvin—A Diner-Out—A Mormon Guest—Apostles—Frank's Ranche—Twelve Anecdotes—Thackeray and Leech, Longfellow, C. Kingsley, Ainsworth, Lord Elgin 322-350 CHAPTER XLI. Some Older Friendships—Nightingale, and Farley Heath—Walter Hawkins—His Tomb—Anchor—Anagrams—Christmas Largesse—Sham Antiques—Joseph Durham—Alice's Statue—"Sir Joe" and the Noviomagians—Prince Albert at St. Peter's Port—Baroness Barnekow—Swedish Proverbial—King Oscar's Poems—Geo. Metivier—French Proverbial—John Sullivan—Canon Jenkins—Barnes, De Chatelain, De Pontigny—Correspondents, &c. 351-362 CHAPTER XLII. Political—A Dark Horse—No Party-Man—Gladstone—Ambidextrous Stanzas—Liberal and Tory—The One-Vote System—Fancy Franchises—The Voter's Motto—Fair Trade v. Free Trade—Radically Conservative—Strikes, &c. 363-372 CHAPTER XLIII. A Cure for Ireland—Racial Difficulties—The Unsunned Corner—Æsop Smith's Prescription—An Irish Balmoral in 1858—My Anti Celtic Ballads—Adventures 373-379 CHAPTER XLIV. Some Spiritist Experiences—Not a Spiritualist, but an Honest Recorder of Facts—Alexis—Howell—Vernon's Mesmerised Child—Mrs. Cora Tappan—Chauncey Townsend's Book—Spirit-Drawings—Planchette—Showers of Flowers, and Sugar-Plums, and Pearls—Mr. Home—Prayer before Séance—The Table in the Air—Live Coals in My Hand—The Vitalised Accordion—The Colonel's Ghost—Iamblicus—Query Electrical Influence—Our Mysterious Key—Miss Hudson—Thought-Reading 380-399 CHAPTER XLV. Fickle Fortune—Losses and Failures—Testimonial—"L'espoir est ma force"—My Levée in 1851—The Missed Codicil—Life and Death 400-403 CHAPTER XLVI. Henry De Beauvoir, killed in Africa—Archdeacon Kitton—Our Old Chancery Suit: A Lost Fortune—Belgravian Five Fields, another Missed Chance—Earl Grosvenor 404-407 CHAPTER XLVII. Flying: my Lecture at the Royal Aquarium with Fred. Burnaby as Chairman—Henry Middleton's Invention—De Lisle Hay's "Conquest of the Air"—Ezekiel's Angels—Ovid, and Tennyson—Claude Hamilton—Extracts 408-412 CHAPTER XLVIII. Luther—The Peroration as to his Life and Exploits—Anniversary Stanzas, in many Languages—Bullinger's Music—Wycliffe

Ballad—Wondrous Parallel 413-416 CHAPTER XLIX. Final—Whatever is, is Right—Sick-bed Repentance—Intuitions—What We Shall Be—Protest Against Atheism—The Infinities—A Childlike Hymn—Eternal Hope—Mercy for Ever—The Assurance of Ovid 417-431

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MY LIFE AS AN AUTHOR.

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CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY.

I have often been asked to prepare an autobiography, but my objections to the task have ever been many and various. To one urgent appeal I sent this sonnet of refusal, which explains itself:—

In fact I always rejected the proposal (warned by recent volumes of pestilential reminiscences) and would none of it; not only from its apparent vainglory as to the inevitable extenuation of one's own faults and failures in life, and the equally certain amplification of self-registered virtues and successes,—but even still more from the mischief it might occasion from a petty record of commonplace troubles and trials, due to the "changes and chances of this mortal life," to the casual mention or omission of friends or foes, to the influence of circumstances and surroundings, and to other revelations—whether pleasant or the reverse—of matters merely personal, and therefore more of a private than a public character.

Indeed, so disquieted was I at the possible prospect of any one getting hold of a mass of manuscript in old days diligently compiled by myself from year to year in several small diaries, that I have long ago ruthlessly made a holocaust of the heap of such written self-memories, fearing their posthumous publication; and in this connection let me now add my express protest against the printing hereafter of any of my innumerable private letters to friends, or other MSS., unless they are strictly and merely of a literary nature.

Biography, where honest and true, is no doubt one of the most fascinating and instructive phases of literature; but it requires a higher Intelligence than any (however intimate) friend of a man to do it fairly and fully; so many matters of character and circumstance must ever be to him unknown, and therefore will be by him unrecorded. And even as to autobiography, who, short of the Omniscient Himself, can take into just account the potency of outward surroundings, and still more of inborn hereditary influences, over both mind and body? the bias to good or evil, and the possession or otherwise of gifts and talents, due very much (under Providence) to one's ancient ancestors and one's modern teachers? We are each of us morally and bodily the psychical and physical composite of a thousand generations. Albeit every individual possesses as his birthright a freewill to turn either to the right or to the left, and is liable to a due responsibility for his words and actions, still the Just Judge alone can and must make allowance for the innate inclinings of heredity and the outward influences of circumstance, and He only can hold the balance between the guilt and innocence, the merit or demerit, of His creature.

So far as my own will goes, I leave my inner spiritual biography to the Recording Angel, choosing only to give some recollections and memories of my outer literary life. For spiritual self-analysis in matters of religion and affection I desire to be as silent as I can be; but in such a book as this absolute taciturnity on such subjects is practically impossible.

For the matter, then, of autobiography, I decline its higher and its deeper aspects; as also I wish not to obtrude on the public eye mere domesticities and privacies of life. But mainly lest others less acquainted with the petty incidents of my career should hereafter take up the task, I accede with all frankness and humility to what seems to me like a present call to duty, having little time to spare at seventy-six, so near the end of my tether,—and protesting, as I well may, against the charge of selfish egotism in a book necessarily spotted on every page with the insignificant letter I; and while, of course on human-nature principles, willing enough to exhibit myself at the best, promising also not to hide the second best, or worse than that, where I can perceive it.

That shrewd old philosopher, Benjamin Franklin, thus excuses his own self-imposed task of "autobiography," and I cannot do better than quote and adopt his wise and just remarks:—

"In thus employing myself, I shall yield to the inclination so natural to old men, of talking of themselves and their own actions, and I shall indulge it without being tiresome to those who, from respect to my age, might conceive themselves obliged to listen to me, since they will always be free to read me or not. And (I may as well confess it, as the denial would be believed by nobody) I shall, perhaps, not a little gratify my own vanity. Indeed, I never heard or saw the introductory words, 'Without vanity I may say,' &c., but some vain thing immediately followed. Most people dislike vanity in others, whatever share they may have of it themselves; but I give it fair quarter wherever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of good to the possessor, and to others who are within his sphere of action; and therefore, in many cases, it would not be altogether absurd if a man were to thank God for his vanity among the other comforts of life.

"And now I speak of thanking God, I desire, with all humility, to acknowledge that I attribute the happiness of my past life to His divine providence, which led me to the means I used, and gave the success. My belief of this induces me to hope, though I must not presume, that the same goodness will still be exercised towards me in continuing that happiness or enabling me to bear a fatal reverse, which I may experience as others have done; the complexion of my future fortune being known to Him only in whose power it is to bless us, even in our afflictions."

Thus speaketh the honest wisdom of Benjamin Franklin.

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I do not see that a better plan can be chosen for carrying out the title of this book than the one I have adopted, namely, tracing from the earliest years to old age the author's literary lifework, illustrated by accounts of, and specimens from, his various books and writings, especially those which are

absolutely out of print, or, haply have never been published. No doubt, in such excerpts, exhibited at their best, the critical accusations of unfairness, self-seeking, and so forth, will be made, and may be met by the true consideration that something of this sort is inevitable in autobiography. However, for the matter of vanity, all I know of myself is the fact that praise, if consciously undeserved, only depresses me instead of elating; that a noted characteristic of mine through life has been to hide away in the rear rather than rush to the front, unless, indeed, forced forward by duty, when I can be bold enough, if need be; and that one defect in me all know to be a dislike to any assumption of dignity—surely a feeling the opposite to self-conceit; whilst, if I am not true, simple, and sincere, I am worse than I hope I am, and all my friends are deceived in their kind judgment of me.

But let this book speak for itself; I trust it is honest, charitable, and rationally religious. If I have (and I show it through all my writings) a shrinking from priestcraft of every denomination, that feeling I take to be due to some ancient heredity ingrained, or, more truly, inburnt into my nature from sundry pre-Lutheran confessors and martyrs of old, from whom I claim to be descended, and by whose spirit I am imbued. Not but that 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."

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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, viâ 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 particular, her uncle (my wife's father), Arthur William Devis, the well-known historical painter, and her great-uncle, Anthony Devis, who filled Albury House with his landscapes.

Some of our old German stock crossed the Atlantic in Puritan times, and many of the name have attained wealth and position both in Canada and the United States; notably Sir Charles Tupper northwards, and sundry rich merchants in New York, Virginia, and the Carolines southwardly.

Of my infancy let me record that I "enjoyed" very delicate health, chiefly due, as I now judge, to the constant cuppings and bleedings whereby "the faculty" of those days combated teething fits, and (perhaps with Malthusian proclivities) killed off young children. I remember, too, that the broad meadows, since developed into Regent's Park and Primrose Hill, then "truly rural," and even up to Chalk Farm, then notorious for duels, were my nursery ramblings in search of cowslips and new milk. Also, that once at least in those infantile days, my father took me to see Winsor's Patent Gaslights at Carlton House, and how he prognosticated the domestic failure of so perilous an explosive, more than one blowing-up having carelessly occurred.

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Another infantile recollection is memorable, as thus. My father's annual holiday happened one year to be at Bognor, where a patron patient of his, Lord Arran, rented a pleasant villa, and he had for a visitor at the time no less a personage than George the Third: it must have been during some lucid interval, perhaps after the Great Thanksgiving at St. Paul's. My father took his little boy with him to call upon the Earl, not thinking to see the King; but when we came in there was his kind-hearted Majesty, who patted my curls and gave me his blessing! How far the mysterious efficacy of the royal touch affected my after career believers in the divine rights and spiritual powers of a king may speculate as they please. At all events I got a good man's blessing.

I remember also in my nursery days to have heard this curious story of a dream. My father, when a young man, was a student at Guy's Hospital, from which school of medicine he went to Yarmouth to attend the wounded after the battle of Copenhagen. He was on one occasion leaving Guernsey for Southampton in the clumsy seagoing smack of those days, when, on the night before embarking, he dreamt that on his way to the harbour he crossed the churchyard and fell into an open grave. Telling this to his parents at "The Pollet," they would not let him go, with a sort of superstitious wisdom; for, strangely enough, the smack was seized on its voyage by a privateer, and all the crew and passengers were consigned—for twelve years—to a French prison! I have heard my father tell this tale, and noted early how true was Dr. Watts' awkward line, "On little things what great depend." I might say more about warnings in dreams and other somnolencies, whereof we all have experiences. For instance, my "Dream of Ambition" in Proverbial Philosophy was a real one. And this reminds me now of another like sort of spiritual monition alluded to in my Proverbial Essay on "Truth in Things False," which has several times occurred to myself, as this, for example: Years ago, in Devonshire, for the first time, I was on the top of a coach passing through a town—I think it was Crediton—and I had the strange feeling that I had seen all this before: now, we changed horses just on this side of a cross street, and I resolved within myself to test the truth of the place being new to me or not, by prophesying what I should see right and left as we passed; to my consternation it was all as I had foreseen,—a market-place with the usual incidents. Now, if reasonably asked how to account for this (and most of us have felt the like), I reply that possibly in an elevated state of health and spirits the soul may outrun the body, and literally foresee coming events both real and

ideal. But we must leave this to the Psychical Society for a judgment upon the famous Horatian philosophy of "more things in heaven and earth," &c.

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On Mr. Galton's topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to myself. Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family. As to my father's surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain, wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs, labelled by my father "in my late dear father's handwriting," but whether or not original, I cannot tell. As a Guernseyman, he might well be as much French as English. They seem to me clever and worthy of Beranger, though long before him: possibly they are my grandsire's. A very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr. John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are excellent, and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when he was a boy.

About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals so with men, "fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;" this so far as bodies are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable instances prove, where children do not take after their parents. If, however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary talent, or at all events authorship, is hereditary, especially in these days of that general epidemic, the "cacoethes scribendi."

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I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and as I cannot improve upon it, and it has never been printed in England, I produce it here in its integrity.

A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class were more than sixty-five years ago cannot fail to have much to interest the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because we may now indulge in the self-complacency of being everyway wiser, better, and happier than our recent forebears. And in setting myself to write these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against or for either the dead or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom "schools and schoolmasters." It is true that sometimes I loved them not, neither can I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood's hard experience has not been altogether that of their own boys.

I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in "little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an epitaph on himself the following effusion:

At this time of day I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read with me Cornelius Nepos and Cæsar and some portions of that hopeless grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption of perpetual sandwiches and beer.

The first school chosen for me (though expensive, there could not have been a worse one) was a large mixed establishment for boys of all ages, from infancy to early manhood, belonging to one Rev. Dr. Morris of Egglesfield House, Brentford Butts, which I now judge to have been conducted solely with a view to the proprietor's pocket, without reference to the morals, happiness, or education of the pupils committed to his care. All I care to remember of this false priest (and there were many such of old, whatever may be the case now) are his cruel punishments, which passed for discipline, his careful cringing to parents, and his careless indifference towards their children, and in brief his total unfitness for the twin duties of pastor and teacher. A large private school of mixed ages and classes is perilously liable to infection from licentious youths left to themselves and their evil propensities, and I can feelingly recollect how miserable for nearly a year was that poor little helpless innocent of seven under the unrestricted tyranny of one Cooke (in after years a life convict for crime) who did all he could to pollute the infant mind of the little fag delivered over to his cruelty. Cowper's Tirocinium well expresses the situation:—