I heard just now a story of a little boy, who replied to the common question, “What he would like to be when he grew up?” by saying that he should like to be either a giant or a retired stockbroker!  I find the qualifying adjective delicious, and admire the pronounced taste for repose indicated by either side of the alternative.  But my propensities were more active, and in the days before I entered my teens I used always to reply to similar demands, that I would be a “king’s messenger”!  I knew no other life which approached so nearly to perpetual motion.  “The road” was my paradise, and it is a true saying that the 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 discourse, saying, “Well, it is a very old story, young gentleman, and it is mighty difficult to find anything new to say about it!”