the wonderful and my love of the adventurous. My studies, such as
they were, were not by any means suited to curb or direct the vagrant
tastes my childhood had acquired: on the contrary, the old poets, with
their luxurious description of the 'green wood' and the forest life;
the fashionable novelists, with their spirited accounts of the
wanderings of some fortunate rogue, and the ingenious travellers, with
their wild fables, so dear to the imagination of every boy, only
fomented within me a strong though secret regret at my change of life,
and a restless disgust to the tame home and bounded roamings to which
I was condemned. When I was about seventeen, my father sold his
property (which he had become possessed of in right of my mother), and
transferred the purchase money to the security of the Funds. Shortly
afterwards he died; the bulk of his fortune became mine; the remainder
was settled upon a sister, many years older than myself, whom, in
consequence of her marriage and residence in a remote part of Wales, I
had never yet seen."

"Now, then, I was perfectly free and unfettered; my guardian lived in
Scotland, and left me entirely to the guidance of my tutor, who was
both too simple and too indolent to resist my inclinations. I went to
London, became acquainted with a set of most royal scamps, frequented
the theatres and the taverns, the various resorts which constitute the
gayeties of a blood just above the middle class, and was one of the
noisiest and wildest 'blades' that ever heard the 'chimes by midnight'
and the magistrate's lecture for matins. I was a sort of leader among
the jolly dogs I consorted with."

"My earlier education gave a raciness and nature to my delineations of
'life' which delighted them. But somehow or other I grew wearied of
this sort of existence. About a year after I was of age my fortune