e the character
and effect of virgin forest.

Having no boy-companions (for my only brother was ten years older than
myself), of course I played no games, except croquet. I was brought up
in a sporting home, my father being an enthusiastic fox-hunter and a
good all-round sportsman. I abhorred shooting, and was badly bored by
coursing and fishing. Indeed, I believe I can say with literal truth
that I have never killed anything larger than a wasp, and that only in
self-defence. But Woburn is an ideal country for riding, and I spent a
good deal of my time on an excellent pony, or more strictly, galloway.
An hour or two with the hounds was the reward of virtue in the
schoolroom; and cub-hunting in a woodland country at 7 o'clock on a
September morning still remains my most cherished memory of physical
enjoyment.

"That things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is
half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now
rest in unvisited tombs." Most true: and among that faithful number I
must remember our governess,--Catherine Emily Runciman--who devoted
forty years of her life, in one capacity or another, to us and to our
parents. She was what boys call "jolly out of school," but rather
despotic in it; and, after a few trials of strength, I was emancipated
from her control when I was eight. When we were in London for the
Session of Parliament, I attended a Day School, kept by two sisters of
John Leech, in a curious little cottage, since destroyed, at the bottom
of Lower Belgrave Street. Just at the age when, in the ordinary course,
I should have gone to a boarding-school, it was discovered that I was
physically unfit for the experiment; and then I had a series of tutors
at home. To one of these tutors my father wrote--"I must warn you of
your pupil's powers of conversation, and tact in leading his teachers
into it."

But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though
old-fashioned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in
miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of
literary enjoyment, and _Pickwick_ (in the original green covers) came
soon after. Shakespeare and _Don Quixote_ were imposed by paternal
authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope,
Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were among my
earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries and
encyclopaedias. Tennyson was the fir