I AM afraid that my mother was a good deal disappointed at the non-fulfilment of the dream which she had imagined would be accomplished when I returned from Germany—a dream in which all the leisure portion of my life was to be passed in her company, and in improving my mind and making myself famous in some line not quite decided upon. She had plenty of sound common-sense, and ought to have known the proneness of youth to give. way to the temptations with which it is surrounded; but she seemed to have an idea that her one duckling was to be different from the rest of the brood; and when she found him perpetually immersed in the pond of pleasure, and never tired of diving down, loudly quacking his delight, upon any inducement to do so, she felt that the one hope of her later life was not destined to be realized.

Her reproaches were not very many, and certainly not very bitter. It had always been her desire that I should do something to distinguish myself in some professionat the Bar, she had hoped; and when circumstances proved that such a career was impossible, she had accepted Lord Clanricarde's appointment with special gratitude, knowing as she did that the holding of a Government situation was by no means incompatible with other employment-literary, for instance. Look at Charles Lamb in the India House; and there was Mr. Sam Anderson, an old friend of my father's, who was Registrar of something in Chancery Lane, and who had known Sir Water Scott, and written some convivial songs, and been introduced into Christopher North's "Noctes Ambrosianæ " under another name. Thus my dear mother, who always laughingly declared there was a great deal of Mrs. Nickleby

in her, would prattle on, particularly lamenting that, on the rare occasions when I passed an evening at home, and invariably passed it in reading, I should indulge in the perusal of such very light literature, instead of devoting myself to the acquisition of a store of valuable information.

She had read somewhere that Sir Walter Scott had said the curse of his life had been his "desultory reading.' "" I cannot tell whence she obtained this remarkable declaration. I have never found it in Lockhart's Life; and it seems exactly the opposite of what Scott would have said, and what must have been the truth. But that was my mother's text, and on it she preached many a simple sermon. Very different in her treatment of the same subject was my godmother, a worthy old spinster lady whom I have mentioned as living with us. "What with his 'Pickwick' and his Punch" these were the works always selected as typical of my studies-she would remark, with great asperity, "I wonder the boy hasn't softening of the brain! I'm only sorry my uncle Beilby is not alive to give him a good talking to!" "My uncle Beilby," who figured perpetually in the old lady's conversation under this guise or as "the dear Bishop," was Dr. Beilby Porteous, a former diocesan of London, whose portrait hung on our dining-room wall, and whose name was to me anathema maranatha from the manner in which it was always being held up to me as precept and example.

Although the pursuit of pleasure was at that time my most chosen avocation, and although both "Pickwick " and Punch had a full share of my admiration, the old lady's sarcastic condemnation of my literary tastes was far too sweeping. I had become John Baker's pupil then, and was well grounded in English poetry and standard prose. In those days Macaulay's History was creating much excitement and discussion, and I had brought it back from one of my visits to the Continent in, I am ashamed to say, a Tauchnitz edition, and was completely fascinated by its brilliancy. And just about then appeared the first numbers of Household Words, which I devoured with extreme eagerness, and the early volumes

In

of which still appear to me, after a tolerably wide experience of such matters, to be perfect models of what a magazine intended for general reading should be. them, besides the admirable work done by Dickens himself-and he never was better than in his concentrated essays there were the dawning genius of Sala, which had for me a peculiar fascination; the novels of Mrs. Gaskell; the antiquarian lore of Peter Cunningham and Charles Knight; the trenchant criticism of Forster; the first-fruits of Wilkie Collins's unrivalled plot-weaving; the descriptive powers of R. H. Horne, who as a prosewriter was terse and practical; the poetic pathos of Adelaide Procter; the Parisian sketches of Blanchard Jerrold; the singularly original "Roving Englishman " series of Grenville Murray; the odd humor of Henry Spicer.

Only vaguely in those days had I heard of these delightful beings; but of the writers engaged on the Man in the Moon, a humorous illustrated monthly periodical then appearing under the acknowledged editorship of Albert Smith and Angus Reach, I had somewhat more direct knowledge. I had seen Charles Kenney at the French plays talking to an earnest - faced, long-haired young man whom he called Angus Reach; and at the house of some friends I had met a delightful old lady whom they and every one addressed as "Aunt Sally," and who was actually the live aunt of that rollicking littérateur, Albert Smith, and dwelt in her nephew's cottage in that very village of Chertsey about which he was always writing. "Aunt Sally was not the rose, but she had lived very close to it, and I venerated her accordingly.

What an existence was that led by those men! To write, and to publish what you wrote, and to be paid for writing it! The theatrical critics, too, with free entrée everywhere, and wielding such enormous power! I knew them all by sight, and used to sit gaping at them with wonder and admiration. John Oxenford of the Times, enthroned in a box; David Hastings for the Herald; Reach, and sometimes Shirley Brooks, for the Chronicle; Howard Glover for the Morning Post; Heraud, the long

we often been told, and though I believe, ve done very well as an actor, having culty and dramatic power of narration, ted an appearance on the stage.

into the ranks of literary men, among ossibly, by industry and perseverance, ion, began to be my constant thought; aged in the hope that I might succeed, an anything else, by reading the career which, in its well-remembered yellow een appearing month by month for the d in its complete form was just obtain

es.

There is no prose story in our Engeven the "Christmas Carol," not even not even the "Scenes of Clerical Life" "—and now I have named what are to ous-which interests and affects me like had this effect from the very first. I so thoroughly. The scenes in the prohe Fotheringay, her father, the promptwere such perfect creations (to this seen any hint as to where Thackeray hese people, who were quite out of his osition of Pendennis and his mother was hat of me and mine-her devotion, his e fact that I was personally acquainted edeckne, the original of Foker, in whom

he was reproduced in the most ludicrously lifelike manner: all this awakened in me a special interest in the book; and when, in the course of Pen's fortunes, he enters upon the literary career, writes his verses for the Spring Annual, dines with Bungay, visits Shandon, is engaged on the Pall Mall Gazette, and chums with Warrington, who makes that ever-to-be-quoted speech about the power of the press: "Look at that, Pen! There she is, the great engine; she never sleeps," etc.-when I came to this portion of the book my fate was sealed. To be a member of that wonderful Corporation of the Goosequill, to be recognized as such, to be one of those jolly fellows who earned money and fame, as I thought, so easily and so pleasantly, was the one desire of my life; and, if zeal and application could do it, I determined that my desire should be gratified.

But, as I have since had occasion to point out to many scores of eager neophytes, the literary profession is the very one in which, though zeal and application are afterwards of great assistance, they are not the be-all and endall: something more is absolutely requisite at the outset. It is of no use, as John Oxenford used to say, looking over his spectacles in his inimitably dry, sententious way-"It's of no use printing in italics if you've got no ink;" and it certainly is of no use being remarkably practical and business-like in literature if you have no ideas to express. I had, or thought I had, ideas about certain small matters, but how to express them, and where to find the opportunity for such expression, was the difficulty. I had written tolerable verses at school, and had continued the practice, off and on. I felt sure, though I had never attempted it, that I could describe a play and fairly criticise the acting; equally, I could review a novel or a book of travel, and could, I thought, narrate any personal experience which might be worth recording. But how and when and where? The desire for some such outlet was becoming overwhelming, and was making me positively ill. Thus, then, my Muse labored, and thus, at last, was she delivered.

It was, I grieve to say, in church, in St. John's Wood