minister of the Church of England, which seemed to hold out to me the prospect of an honourable and useful career in life, while it was favoured by the opportunities which were opening to me. I indulged my own taste while I gratified my father's wishes, and satisfied him that he had not done ill in directing my course to the University. I anticipated a residence of several years as tutor at my college, and hoped to occupy the time with congenial associates and studies while waiting for the college living which was in due time to set me at liberty. I longed for literary leisure, and I proposed to utilize it in the line of my accepted calling. I am well aware how little sympathy such sentiments will command from the modern school of candidates for the priesthood. It may be that such rank weeds grow less freely in the modern gardens. I know that I have much cause for humiliation in this and other matters; yet I venture to hope that the fair amount of success with which my simple aims have been accompanied may be taken in some sense as their justification.

So it was then that I received the imposition of the Bishop's hands in St. George's Church, Hanover Square, in June, 1833. A week or two afterwards I paid a visit to my dear friend John Frere, with whom I had communicated most freely on the subject, for he too had been recently ordained and was serving his first curacy at Wake's Colne, in Essex. It was in his church that I preached my first sermon. It was under his roof that I first conceived a lively interest in one of his sisters, whom I had known but slightly before, but whose attractiveness I had not failed already to recognize.

Of Anne Frere, who continued for many years to reign supreme in my imagination, I will not allow myself even now to say much more. I was of course in no position to indulge in an affair of the heart so serious as this proved to be. I was in no position even to make my wishes openly known, and when I betrayed them the Frere family were displeased and my own were naturally troubled. It was well for me, no doubt, that I did not expose myself to the disappointment which might have been in store for me. I yielded after long and violent struggles to the restraint which was forced upon

me, but not without deep and too lasting resentment at what seemed to be at least harshness in applying it. The result was an estrangement for many years from a family to which I was warmly attached; not quite forgotten, I am sure, but still less forgetting. I lived on apart and silently till the beloved object had long fallen into other, perhaps worthier, hands. But there was a Providence behind the scenes which all the time took heed of me, and the hour at last arrived, little expected, when I was enabled to console myself with the love of another sister, in whom I have found all and more than I had lost. And the gold of my wedded life has been gilded over again by the deep affection which has ever since subsisted between myself and my wife's dearest sister; the most loyal of sisters she has indeed been to us both.

Such are some of the reminiscences of my early life which have seemed to crowd, almost unbidden, into my memory. They present indeed but a few of the images which pass rapidly before me. From the period at which I have now arrived, the period as I may call it of my modern history, my recollections become far less frequent and vivid. It would be irksome and unprofitable to prosecute them farther. I do not know whether one's recent life is generally less interesting than the earlier in the living, but it seems to be far less interesting in recalling and recording. Nor, if I could write an account of it, would it be so attractive to the younger generation for whom I chiefly write, who are already pretty well acquainted with the incidents with which they have themselves been contemporary.

Here then I reach my goal. I have only now to commend my narrative to the loving attention of those most nearly connected with me whom I may hope to leave behind me. I commend it to my dear wife, who I trust will survive me by at least as many years as I have in birth preceded her, being well assured that every day she is spared to my children will shed some blessing upon them. I commend to my wife this account of my early thoughts and doings in amends for the sad habit of reserve and reticence, engendered by a long bachelor life and by some grave disappointments on a temper

somewhat cold and sluggish, by which I have too much tried her indulgence. I commend it to my children with the assurance that I have had them in my thoughts in almost every line that I have written of it, auguring from the Providence which has most surely shaped the course of my own early experience that the same divine and blessed guidance will be also vouchsafed to them. God be praised for all His blessings, and especially for the blessing He has given me in wife and children.

April 16, 1880.

LETTERS

CAMBRIDGE, 1826-1848

MR. MERIVALE TO HIS SON CHARLES (AT CAMBRIDGE).

COCKWOOD, October 21, 1826.

A rainy morning, with the recollection that I shall soon be too busy to write letters, induces me to sit down and answer yours, notwithstanding you have heard from your mother so lately.

I wish you may find a good companion in the son of my old friend Tennyson. You don't say whether his father spoke of me, but I hope you told him that I regretted our not meeting together at Cambridge on this occasion. It is so pleasant to me to retrace my own college life by means of what you tell me of yours, that I trust you will enable me to do so as much and as often as possible. In this respect I shall be always more interested in hearing from you than I even was in hearing from Herman, as the minutest particulars of what you do, where you go, and with whom you associate, are almost sure to awaken some corresponding recollection in me-a pleasure which the diary of an Oxonian would necessarily fail of exciting. All you have to say on the subject of college lectures, and of your studies in general, will be doubly interesting on account of their future as well as present importance, and I may be able from time to time to afford you some useful hints, though I was myself, from circumstances which you know already, a truant scholar, and have never ceased to regret that I was so. With regard to your doubt whether to apply most to classics or mathematics at present, you are a better judge than I