Like most boys who have become authors, I made attempts in literary
composition independently of those which were directly encouraged by my
master. In this way I wrote a number of articles that were accepted by
the "Historic Times," a London illustrated journal of those days which
was started under the patronage of the Church of England, but had not a
great success. My first articles were on the Universities, of which I
knew nothing except by hearsay, and on "Civilization, Ancient and
Modern," which was rather a vast subject for a boy whose reading had
been so limited. However, the editor of the "Historic Times" had not the
least suspicion of my age, so I favored him with a long series of
articles on Rome in 1849, forming altogether as complete a history of
the city for that year as could have been written by one who had never
seen it, who did not know Italian, and who had not access to any other
sources of information than those which are accessible to everybody in
the newspapers.

Under these circumstances, it may seem absurd to have undertaken such a
task, but the reader may be reminded that learned historians undertake
to tell us what happened long ago from much less ample material. I got
no money for these articles (there were twelve of them), and no
publisher would reprint them because there was no personal observation
in them which publishers always expect in a narrative of contemporary
events. The work had, however, been a good exercise for me in the
digesting and setting in literary order of a mass of confused material.

My passion for heraldry and hawking led to the production of a little
book on heraldry which was an imitation of Sir John Sebright's
"Observations on Hawking," a treatise that seemed to me simple, and
clearly arranged.