r might have reaped some advantage from this
change; but the school was too near home, and his mother, though she
tormented his existence, was never content if he were out of her sight.
His delicate health was an excuse for converting him, after a short
interval, into a day scholar; then many days of attendance were omitted;
finally, the solitary walk home through Mr. Mellish's park was dangerous
to the sensibilities that too often exploded when they encountered on
the arrival at the domestic hearth a scene which did not harmonise with
the fairy-land of reverie.

The crisis arrived, when, after months of unusual abstraction and
irritability, my father produced a poem. For the first time, my
grandfather was seriously alarmed. The loss of one of his argosies,
uninsured, could not have filled him with more blank dismay. His idea of
a poet was formed from one of the prints of Hogarth hanging in his room,
where an unfortunate wight in a garret was inditing an ode to riches,
while dunned for his milk-score. Decisive measures were required to
eradicate this evil, and to prevent future disgrace--so, as seems the
custom when a person is in a scrape, it was resolved that my father
should be sent abroad, where a new scene and a new language might divert
his mind from the ignominious pursuit which so fatally attracted him.
The unhappy poet was consigned like a bale of goods to my grandfather's
correspondent at Amsterdam, who had instructions to place him at some
collegium of repute in that city. Here were passed some years not
without profit, though his tutor was a great impostor, very neglectful
of his pupils, and both unable and disinclined to guide them in severe
studies. This preceptor was a man of letters, though a wretched writer,
with a good library, and a spirit inflamed with all the philosophy of
the eighteenth century, then (1780-1) about to bring forth and bear its
long-matured fruits. The intelligence and disposition of my father
attracted his attention, and rather interested him. He taught his charge
little, for he was himself generally occupied in writing bad odes, but
he gave him free warren in his library, and before his pupil was
fifteen, he had read the works of Voltaire and had dipped into Bayle.
Strange that the characteristics of a writer so born and brought up
should have been so essentially English; not merely from his mastery
over our language, but from his keen and profound sympathy with all that
concerned