ty which withers up all the noblest
aspirations of the soul, and which I possessed partly from religion, and
partly from the feeling that, as a Dissenter, I was a social Pariah in
the eyes of the generation around. My modesty, I own, has been in my way
all through life. The world takes a man at his own valuation. It is too
busy to examine each particular claim, and the prize is won by him who
most loudly and pertinaciously blows his own trumpet. At any rate, in
our Suffolk home we enjoyed

Lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day--the easy night--
The spirits pure--the slumbers light--
That fly the approach of morn.

The one drawback was the long-drawn darkness of the winter night. I
slept in an old attic in an old house, where every creak on the stairs,
when the wind was roaring all round, gave me a stroke of pain, and where
ghastly faces came to me in the dark of old women haggard and hideous and
woebegone. De Quincy hints in his numerous writings at boyish times of a
similar kind. I fancy most of us in boyhood are tortured in a similar
way. Fuseli supped on pork chops to procure fitting subjects for his
weird sketches. But we never had pork chops; yet in the visions of the
night what awful faces I saw--almost enough to turn one's brain and to
make one's hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

Country villages are always fifty years behind the times, and so it was
with us. In the farmyard there was no steam engine, and all the work was
done by manual labour, such as threshing the corn with the flail. In
many families the only light was that of the rushlight, often home made.
Lucifer matches were unknown, and we had to get a light by means of a
flint and tinder, which ignited the brimstone match, always in readiness.
Cheap ready-made clothes were unknown, and the poor mother had a good
deal of tailoring to do. In the cottage there was little to read save
the cheap publications of the Religious Tract Society, and the voluminous
writings of the excellent Hannah More, teaching the lower orders to fear
God and honour the king, and not to meddle with those that were given to
change. Her "Coelebs in Search of a Wife" was the only novel that ever
found its way into religious circles--with the exception of "Robinson
Crusoe" and "The Pilgrim's Progress," and that was awfully illustrated.
Anybody who talked of the rights of man at that time was little better
than o