dies. It was known, moreover, that he was going to sea,
always a ground of pre-eminence with schoolboys; and in his case the
glory was not altogether future, it wore a present form when he came
driving to Rye behind four horses in the same carriage with an admiral.
"I was not a little proud, you may believe," says he.

In 1814, when he was thirteen years of age, he was carried by his father
to Chichester to the Bishop's Palace. The Bishop had heard from his
brother the Admiral that Charles was likely to do well, and had an
order from Lord Melville for the lad's admission to the Royal Naval
College at Portsmouth. Both the Bishop and the Admiral patted him on the
head and said, "Charles will restore the old family"; by which I gather
with some surprise that, even in these days of open house at Northiam
and golden hope of my aunt's fortune, the family was supposed to stand
in need of restoration. But the past is apt to look brighter than
nature, above all to those enamoured of their genealogy; and the ravages
of Stephen and Thomas must have always given matter of alarm.

What with the flattery of bishops and admirals, the fine company in
which he found himself at Portsmouth, his visits home, with their gaiety
and greatness of life, his visits to Mrs. Buckner (soon a widow) at
Windsor, where he had a pony kept for him and visited at Lord Melville's
and Lord Harcourt's and the Leveson-Gowers, he began to have "bumptious
notions," and his head was "somewhat turned with fine people"; as to
some extent it remained throughout his innocent and honourable life.

In this frame of mind the boy was appointed to the _Conqueror_, Captain
Davie, humorously known as Gentle Johnnie. The Captain had earned this
name by his style of discipline, which would have figured well in the
pages of Marryat. "Put the prisoner's head in a bag and give him another
dozen!" survives as a specimen of his commands; and the men were often
punished twice or thrice in a week. On board the ship of this
disciplinarian, Charles and his father were carried in a billy-boat from
Sheerness in December 1816: Charles with an outfit suitable to his
pretensions, a twenty-guinea sextant and 120 dollars in silver, which
were ordered into the care of the gunner. "The old clerks and mates," he
writes, "used to laugh and jeer me for joining the ship in a billy-boat,
and when they found I was from Kent, vowed I was an old Kentish
smuggler. This to my pride, you will believe,