myself, it will not be so much my intention to speak of the little
details of my private life, as of what I, and perhaps others round
me, have done in literature; of my failures and successes such as
they have been, and their causes; and of the opening which a literary
career offers to men and women for the earning of their bread. And
yet the garrulity of old age, and the aptitude of a man's mind to
recur to the passages of his own life, will, I know, tempt me to say
something of myself;--nor, without doing so, should I know how to
throw my matter into any recognised and intelligible form. That I,
or any man, should tell everything of himself, I hold to be impossible.
Who could endure to own the doing of a mean thing? Who is there
that has done none? But this I protest:--that nothing that I say
shall be untrue. I will set down naught in malice; nor will I give
to myself, or others, honour which I do not believe to have been
fairly won. My boyhood was, I think, as unhappy as that of a young
gentleman could well be, my misfortunes arising from a mixture of
poverty and gentle standing on the part of my father, and from an
utter want on my part of the juvenile manhood which enables some
boys to hold up their heads even among the distresses which such
a position is sure to produce.

I was born in 1815, in Keppel Street, Russell Square; and while a
baby, was carried down to Harrow, where my father had built a house
on a large farm which, in an evil hour he took on a long lease from
Lord Northwick. That farm was the grave of all my father's hopes,
ambition, and prosperity, the cause of my mother's sufferings, and
of those of her children, and perhaps the director of her destiny
and of ours. My father had been a Wykamist and a fellow of New
College, and Winchester was the destination of my brothers and
myself; but as he had friends among the masters at Harrow, and as