was remarkably indebted to nature, at least for externals. She had fine
eyes--large, dark, and sentimental; her dress, which would now be
preposterous, seemed to me, then, the perfection of all taste, and was
in the highest fashion of her time. Her beauty worked miracles; for now
and then I have observed even my father's eye fixed on her, with
something of the admiration which we might conceive in an Esquimaux for
a fixed star, or in an Italian highwayman for some Parian statue which
he had stumbled on in his thickets. But the admiration was soon absorbed
in the job in hand, and he turned away--to scribble to the Minister. Of
the younger portion of the family I shall say but little. Children are
happiest in the nursery, and there I leave them. I had two sisters,
sweet little creatures, one with black eyes and the other with blue.
This is enough for their description. My four brothers were four rough,
bold, well-looking animals, all intended for ambassadors, admirals,
generals, and secretaries of state--for my father had too long tasted of
the honey of official life to think that there was any other food for a
gentleman in the world. He had been suckled for too many years at those
breasts, which, like the bosom of the great Egyptian goddess, pour the
stream of life through whole generations of hangers-on, to believe that
any other fount of existence was to be named but the civil list. I am
strongly inclined to surmise that he would have preferred a pencil,
purloined from the Treasury, to all the cedars of Lebanon.

It may be presumed that I was destined for public life--in other words,
to live on the public; and, to prepare me for the performance of a part,
alternately menial and master--supple as the slave, and superb as the
minister--I was sent to Eton. At this great school of the aristocracy,
would-be and real--barons and dukes _in esse_, and the herald's office
alone, or bedlam, knows what _in posse_, I remained for the customary
number of years. If whoever does me the honour to read these pages,