always been a terror to me, and at times, nay generally, religion and
philosophy have been altogether unavailing to mitigate the terror in
any way. But it has been a comfort to me to reflect that whatever
death may be, it is the inheritance of the whole human race; that I am
not singled out, but shall merely have to pass through what the weakest
have had to pass through before me. In the worst of maladies, worst at
least to me, those which are hypochondriacal, the healing effect which
is produced by the visit of a friend who can simply say, "I have
endured all that," is most marked. So it is not impossible that some
few whose experience has been like mine may, by my example, be freed
from that sense of solitude which they find so depressing.

I was born, just before the Liverpool and Manchester Railway was
opened, in a small country town in one of the Midland shires. It is
now semi-manufacturing, at the junction of three or four lines of
railway, with hardly a trace left of what it was fifty years ago. It
then consisted of one long main street, with a few other streets
branching from it at right-angles. Through this street the mail-coach
rattled at night, and the huge waggon rolled through it, drawn by four
horses, which twice a week travelled to and from London and brought us
what we wanted from the great and unknown city.

My father and mother belonged to the ordinary English middle class of
well-to-do shop-keepers. My mother's family came from a little
distance, but my father's had lived in those parts for centuries. I
remember perfectly well how business used to be carried on in those
days. There was absolutely no competition, and although nobody in the
town who was in trade got rich, except the banker and the brewer,
nearly everybody was tolerably well off, and certainly not pressed with
care as their successors are now. The draper, who lived a little way