child is father to the man. The Shakespearian passage which
earliest impressed my childish mind and carried with it my heartiest
sympathies was the song of old Autolycus:

"Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
Your merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a."

Over how many miles of "foot-path way," under how many green hedges,
has my childish treble chanted that enlivening ditty!

But that was in much earlier days to those I am now writing of.

During the years between my dreary time at Birmingham and my first
departure for Italy, I find the record of many pedestrian or other
rambles in England and abroad. There they are, all recorded day by
day--the qualities of the inns and the charges at them (not so much
less than those of the present day as might be imagined, with the
exception of the demands for beds), the beauty and specialties of the
views, the talk of wayfaring companions, the careful measurements of
the churches, the ever-recurring ascent of the towers of them, &c. &c.

Here and there in the mountains of chaff there may be a grain worth
preserving, as where I read that at Haddon Hall the old lady who
showed the house, and who boasted that her ancestors had been
servitors of the possessors of it for more than three hundred
years, pointed out to me the portrait of one of them, who had been
"forester," hanging in the hall. She also pointed out the window from
which a certain heiress had eloped, and by doing so had carried the
hall and lands into the family of the present owners, and told me that
Mrs. Radcliffe, shortly before the publication of her _Mysteries
of Udolpho_, had visited Haddon, and had sat at that window busily
writing for a long time.

I seem to have been an amateur of sermons in those days, from the
constant records I find of sermons listened to, by no means always,
or indeed generally, complimentary to the preachers. Here is an entry
criticising, with young presumption, a sermon by Dr. Dibdin, whose
bibliophile books, however, I had much taste for.

"I heard Dr. Dibdin preach. He preached with much gesticulation,
emphasis, and grimace the most utterly trashy sermon I ever heard;
words--words--words--without the shadow of an idea in them."

I remember, as if it were yesterday, a shrewd sort of an old lady, the
mother, I think, of the curate of the parish, who heard me, as we were
leaving the church, expressing my opinion of the doctor's