ly dubious, vacillating,
and above all complex. I reserve them, perhaps, for a more private
and personal document; and I may in this way relieve myself from
some at least of the risks of falling into an odious Pharisaism. I
cannot in truth have been an interesting child, and the only
presumption the other way which I can gather from my review is that
there was probably something in me worth the seeing, or my father
and mother would not so much have singled me out to be taken with
them on their journeys.

I was not a devotional child. I have no recollection of early love
for the House of God and for divine service: though after my father
built the church at Seaforth in 1815, I remember cherishing a hope
that he would bequeath it to me, and that I might live in it. I have
a very early recollection of hearing preaching in St. George's,
Liverpool, but it is this: that I turned quickly to my mother and
said, 'When will he have done?' The _Pilgrim's Progress_ undoubtedly
took a great and fascinating hold upon me, so that anything which I
wrote was insensibly moulded in its style; but it was by the force
of the allegory addressing itself to the fancy, and was very like a
strong impression received from the _Arabian Nights_, and from
another work called _Tales of the Genii_. I think it was about the
same time that Miss Porter's _Scottish Chiefs_, and especially the
life and death of Wallace, used to make me weep profusely. This
would be when I was about ten years old. At a much earlier period,
say six or seven, I remember praying earnestly, but it was for no
higher object than to be spared from the loss of a tooth. Here,
however, it may be mentioned in mitigation that the local dentist
of those days, in our case a certain Dr. P. of ---- Street,
Liverpool, was a kind of savage at his work (possibly a very
good-natured man too), with no ideas except to smash and crash. My
religious recollections, then, are a sad blank. Neither was I a
popular boy, though not egregiously otherwise. If I was not a bad
boy, I think that I was a boy with a great absence of goodness. I
was a child of slow, in some points I think of singularly slow,
development. There was more in me perhaps than in the average boy,
but it required greatly more time to set itself in order: and just
so in adult, and in middle and