What I Remember, Volume 1

I have no intention of writing an autobiography. There has been nothing in my life which could justify such a pretension. But I have lived a long time. I remember an aged porter...

These fragmentary recollections of our childish days may have served to suggest some hints of the changes which have made the London of the present day almost--perhaps quite--as...

I was, I think, about eight years old when my parents removed from Keppel Street to Harrow-on-the-Hill. My father’s practice, I take it, was becoming less and less satisfactory,...

Another incident of these boyish years of a very different complexion has made a far deeper impression on my memory. It must have been, to the best of my remembrance, about the...

Meanwhile the fateful year 1820, when I was to be translated from the world of Harrow, and know nothing more of its friendships, quarrels, and politics, was at hand. At the elec...

When I went into college in 1820, at ten years old, Dr. Gabell was the “informator,” and Mr. (afterwards Dr.) Williams the “hostiarius,” or second master. When I quitted it in 1...

I came back from Winchester for the last time after the election of 1828, to find a great change at home. My father, pressed more and more by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted...

My father and I remained between five and six months at Cincinnati, and my remembrances of the time are pleasant ones. In the way of amusement, to the best of my recollection, t...

As the year wore on without any prospect of a vacancy at New College, it became necessary to decide what should be done as regards sending me to the university. My father was ve...

Before quitting a phase of my life, which many, if not most, old men are wont to look back on as their happiest time, but which I, by so considering, should grievously wrong man...

I came down from Oxford to find my mother and my two sisters returned from America, and living in that Harrow Weald farm-house which my brother Anthony, in his _Autobiography_,...

Of all that Anthony there describes I saw nothing. I was attending the “divinity lectures” in Oxford. But as soon as the short course of them was completed, I left England to jo...

I observe that I left Calais in the _banquette_ of the diligence at 6 P.M. on the Friday night, May 8th, 1835, and reached Paris at 3 A.M. on Sunday morning--thirty-three hours....

I left Paris a day or two before my father, mother, and sisters, though bound for the same destination--Bruges. My object in doing so appears to have been to get a sight of some...

That I started on this occasion even more than on any other with the greatest delight “goes without saying.” A longer and more varied journey than I had ever before enjoyed was...

The present generation is perhaps hardly aware--or not habitually so--of the largeness of the space Metternich occupied in the political world half a century ago. It is not too...

I left Vienna by the carriage which carried the imperial mail, shortly before Christmas, in very severe weather. It would be impossible to construct a more comfortable carriage...

At the end of that time I went back to my mother’s house at Hadley. She had in the meantime returned from Vienna, had completed her two volumes on that journey, and published th...

On the 17th of August, in 1838, as I find by my diary, “I went with Henrietta Skerret to see the Baron Dupotet magnetise his patients.” This was my first introduction to a subje...