of
the family, his mother's elder brother and his godfather. The latter,
who was a rigger, and mast-, oar-, and block-maker, lived at Limehouse
in a substantial handsome sort of way, and was kind to his godchild. It
was always a great treat to him to go to Mr. Huffham's; and the London
night-sights as he returned were a perpetual joy and marvel. Here, too,
the comic-singing accomplishment was brought into play so greatly to the
admiration of one of the godfather's guests, an honest boat-builder,
that he pronounced the little lad to be a "progidy." The visits to the
uncle who was at this time fellow-clerk with his father, in Somerset
House, were nearer home. Mr. Thomas Barrow, the eldest of his mother's
family, had broken his leg in a fall; and, while laid up with this
illness, his lodging was in Gerrard Street, Soho, in the upper part of
the house of a worthy gentleman then recently deceased, a bookseller
named Manson, father to the partner in the celebrated firm of Christie &
Manson, whose widow at this time carried on the business. Attracted by
the look of the lad as he went up-stairs, these good people lent him
books to amuse him; among them Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_,
Holbein's _Dance of Death_, and George Colman's _Broad Grins_. The
latter seized his fancy very much; and he was so impressed by its
description of Covent Garden, in the piece called "The Elder Brother,"
that he stole down to the market by himself to compare it with the book.
He remembered, as he said in telling me this, snuffing up the flavor of
the faded cabbage-leaves as if it were the very breath of comic fiction.
Nor was he far wrong, as comic fiction then and for some time after was.
It was reserved for himself to give sweeter and fresher breath to it.
Many years were to pass first, but he was beginning already to make the
trial.

His uncle was shaved by a very odd old barber out of Dean Street, Soho,
who was never tired of reviewing the events of the last war, and
especially of detecting Napoleon's mistakes, and rearranging his whole
life for him on a plan of his own. The boy wrote a description of this
old barber, but never had courage to show it. At about the same time,
taking for his model the description of the canon's housekeeper in _Gil
Blas_, he sketched a deaf old woman who waited on them in Bayham Street,
and who made delicate hashes with walnut-ketchup. As little did he dare
to show this, either; though he thought it, himself, ex