It was my father’s good-will and pleasure to undertake the sole charge of my education.  Fain would I have gone like other lads of my age to public school and college; but on this point, as on most others, he was inflexible.  Himself an obscure physician in a remote country town, he brought me up with no other view than to be his own successor.  The profession was not to my liking.  Somewhat contemplative and nervous by nature, there were few pursuits for which I was less fitted.  I knew this, but dared not oppose him.  Loving study for its own sake, and trusting to the future for some lucky turn of destiny, I yielded to that which seemed inevitable, and strove to make the best of it.

Thus it came to pass that I lived a quiet, hard-working home life, while other boys of my age were going through the joyous experience of school, and chose my companions from the dusty shelves of some three or four gigantic book-cases, instead of from the class and the playground.  Not that I regret it.  I believe, on the contrary, that a boy may have worse companions than books and busts, employments less healthy than the study of anatomy, and amusements more pernicious than Shakespeare and Horace.  Thank Heaven!  I escaped all such; and if, as I have been told, my boyhood was unboyish, and my youth prematurely cultivated, I am content to have been spared the dangers in exchange for the pleasures of a public school.

I do not, however, pretend to say that I did not sometimes pine for the recreations common to my age.  Well do I remember the manifold attractions of Barnard’s Green.  What longing glances I used to steal towards the boisterous cricketers, when going gravely forth upon a botanical walk with my father!  With what eager curiosity have I not lingered many a time before the entrance to a forbidden booth, and scanned the scenic advertisement of a travelling show!  Alas! how the charms of study paled before those intervals of brief but bitter temptation!  What, then, was pathology compared to the pig-faced lady, or the Materia Medica to Smith’s Mexican Circus, patronized by all the sovereigns of Europe?  But my father was inexorable.  He held that such places were, to use his own words, “opened by swindlers for the ruin of fools,” and from one never-to-be-forgotten hour, when he caught me in the very act of taking out my penny-worth at a portable peep-show, he bound me over by a solemn promise (sealed by a whipping) never to repeat the offence under any provocation or pretext whatsoever.  I was a tiny fellow in pinafores when this happened, but having once pledged my word, I kept it faithfully through all the studious years that lay between six and sixteen.