leave behind me some account of a life which they are good enough to say they believe is sufficiently out of the common track to be worth recording; I also am vain enough to believe that a narrative of the very great difficulties with which I have had to contend and which I have contrived to surmount, may possibly be useful to some who are inclined to throw up the cards before the game is lost, and to impute to adverse fortune the result of their own want of steadiness and enterprise.

I was born at Bingham, a small town in the south of Nottinghamshire, of which my father was the Rector, on December 4th, 1811. I was a younger son, one of six children. The living was a good one, and my father had some property of his own. My mother was the daughter of the Rev. Reginald Pyndar, rector of Madresfield, near Malvern.

I had the misfortune (which I share with a sister older than myself) to be what is called an albino. I presume there is no one so entirely free from personal vanity as to be able, without some feeling of reluctance, to discourse on his physical defects and infirmities. But happily, not having been endowed by Nature with a poetical temperament or having a special gift for self-torture, I have contrived to bear this infliction with tolerable equanimity. My poor sister was not so fortunate; she was, I think, the gentlest and the best person I ever knew, but was very keenly alive to this misfortune. Had I felt my peculiarities as she did, anything like public or even active life would have been to me an impossibility; but, putting sentiment aside, the misfortune was serious enough.

The peculiarity of my eyes consists in the total absence of colouring matter; this occasions, of course, especially in a man, a very marked peculiarity of complexion, amounting in early youth to something of effeminacy. For this evil, however, I have found age a sovereign cure; but as the absence of colouring matter extends to the eye, it necessarily occasions a great impatience of light. The eyelids must always be nearly closed, and so I never have been able to enjoy the

luxury of staring anyone full in the face. Of course this intolerance of light must be attended with something very closely approaching to pain. I cannot even conceive the state of a person to whom sight is a function free from all pain and distress, but as I have no standard to measure by I may perhaps exaggerate my own misfortune. The cause of this annoyance is the total absence of what is called the pigmentum nigrum, the dark rim which surrounds the pupil of the eye and absorbs the rays of light which are not needed for the act of vision, and only confuse and disturb it. But, in addition to this defect, I had to contend with a malformation of the eye; one eye has never been available to me for reading, and the other was hypermetropic-that is, the refracting power was so slight that the focus must be very near the back of my head. I began life, in fact, very much in the state of persons who have been couched for cataract, with the two additional disqualifications that I had only one eye to rely upon, and that had no pigmentum nigrum to protect it.

So hopeless did my visual prospects appear that I was six years old before any attempt was made to teach me my letters. Of course, the natural remedy for my sight would have been to use strong magnifying spectacles such as are recommended to persons who have been couched for a cataract. I do not know if such an idea was ever entertained, but I have every reason to be glad that it was not acted on, for experience has proved that the eye was quite unable to bear it.

As it was, my progress was so slow that I was eight years old before I began the great business of life-in other words, entered on the study of the Latin Grammar. So great was the difficulty I found in the beginning of my career that my mother was of opinion I was quite unfit to be sent to school, and that there was no chance for me in the open arena of life. Happily for me, my father formed a truer estimate of the case, and it was decided that the experiment should be tried. I, at least, was never troubled with any misgivings. Nature

had given me as some compensation for many deficiencies. excellent health, good spirits, an easy temper, and a heart which has never failed me in all my trials and difficulties.

The first public event which I remember was the death of the Princess Charlotte, and my surprise at the extreme grief felt by everyone around me for a person whom they had never seen, and I had never heard of. I remember, also, being much affected by the death of Napoleon, though, as I derived my first knowledge of his career from Sir Walter Scott's Biography, I do not know whence I derived my sentiment. I enjoyed the privilege and delight of reading all the writings of the author of Waverley after the Heart of Mid-Lothian as they came out, a literary pleasure which nothing since has ever equalled. I may mention to my credit that I never doubted that Scott was the author: the ground of my belief was a quotation which is to be found in The Bride of Lammermoor and in the notes to The Lady of the Lake.

If thou be hurt with horn of hart

It brings thee to thy bier,

But barbers' hand boar's tusk can cure,

Therefore thou need not fear.

I argued that if the poem and the novel had been written by different hands, the quotation would have been acknowledged by the writer of the novel who might well forget that he had inserted it in a note. I was always very positive as to Scott's authorship of the novels, and received some not unmerited rebukes from my elders and betters for presuming to set my opinion against persons who must know so much better than I. I hope I bore my victory with becoming moderation, but am by no means clear on the point. Our life was a very secluded one. Our nearest, and indeed almost our only, neighbour was the family of Mr. Musters, the husband of Byron's Mary. A visit to my grandfather in Herefordshire in summer, and to Mr. Sherbrooke of Oxton, whose estate has now passed into the hands of my eldest brother, were almost

the only breaks in the monotony of our existence. I did not shine as a playfellow, and so reading, which had been my great difficulty, became my great pleasure.

In 1822 I went to school at Southwell, where my father's family once lived and where many of them are buried. There is one of them, one Gervase Lee, in whom I always took a particular interest because he was fined 500l. by Archbishop Laud in the Star Chamber for writing a scurrilous ballad on the Canons of the Cathedral church of Southwell. I used to fancy that some shreds of his mantle had descended on me, though candour obliges me to confess that his performance was utterly without literary merit, and according to the rule of Horace-si mala condiderit in quem quis carmina jus est judiciumque'-the poet richly deserved all he got.

I spent two years at Southwell, and one year at a school at Risley in Derbyshire, and in September 1825 I went to Winchester as a commoner. This was a most important epoch of my life; anybody can get on somehow at a private school, but a public school to a person labouring under such disabilities as I did was a crucial test under any circumstances, and Winchester, such as it was in my time, was an ordeal which a boy so singular in appearance, and so helpless in some respects as I was, might well have trembled to encounter. Since my time the buildings which we occupied have been pulled down, the hours have been altered, and what I write now has no application to the Winchester of the present day, but such as it was in my time I will describe it for the benefit of boys who think they are badly treated.

The school consisted of 200 boys; 70 collegers and 130 commoners. The collegers were well lodged and fed, had an excellent playground, and the run of the schoolroom when the masters were out of it. In commoners things were very different; the bedrooms were shamefully crowded, there was a very small court-reference being had to the number of boys who were shut up in it-there was a hall of very moderate dimen

sions, considering that in it we lived, studied, and had our meals, there was generally a game of cricket going on, and as my cupboard happened to be what is technically called 'middle on,' the pursuit of the Muses was attended with some difficulty. I have often said to myself' I nunc et versus tecum meditare canoros.'

In these miserable quarters much of the time which was not spent in school was passed. We were expected to be down at six in summer and a quarter to seven in winter; we went into school at half-past seven and stayed there till ten, then we had breakfast-bread as much as we could eat, a pat of butter each, and one pail of milk among 130 boys, for this we made a queue, every fag with his jug. Occasionally, when the competition was more than ordinarily severe, the pail was upset, and the school went milkless to breakfast. Tea and sugar we might find for ourselves if we had the money, they were sold to us at the buttery hatch on account of whom it might concern. We went into school from eleven till twelve, from twelve to one was our play hour; the field was half a mile off, so that to make the most of it we usually ran there and back and came in streaming with perspiration. At one we dined! At two we went into school, where we remained till six, then supper-bread and cheese and beer, then work in the hall till half-past eight, then to bed. Twice a week we had what was called a 'remedy '-I suppose because it was worse than the disease, applying that name to the ordinary school days, we were marched two and two to the hill a mile off, and in consideration of this airing were shut up in the hall for four hours. Sunday was a particularly miserable day; two hours in chapel, nearly three in the cathedral, one hour to walk, and the rest shut up in our court and hall.

It will be seen from this statement that we fasted from seven o'clock in the evening till half-past ten in the morning; that four hours and a half were interposed between rising and breakfast; that we had no food for breakfast but bread; that