“Our hero was the only son of Habakkuk Liston, settled as an anabaptist minister upon the patrimonial soil of his ancestors.  A regular certificate appears, thus entered in the Church-Book at Lupton Magna:—­’Johannes, filius Habakkuk et Rebecccae Liston, Dissentientium, natus quinto Decembri, 1780, baptizatus sexto Februarii sequentis; Sponsoribus J. et W. Woollaston, una cum Maria Merryweather.’  The singularity of an Anabaptist minister conforming to the child-rites of the Church would have tempted me to doubt the authenticity of this entry, had I not been obliged with the actual sight of it, by the favor of Mr. Minns, the intelligent and worthy parish-clerk of Lupton.  Possibly some expectation in point of worldly advantages from some of the sponsors might have induced this unseemly deviation, as it must have appeared, from the practice and principles of that generally rigid sect.  The term Dissentientium was possibly intended by the orthodox clergyman as a slur upon the supposed inconsistency.  What, or of what nature, the expectations we have hinted at may have been, we have now no means of ascertaining.  Of the Woollastons no trace is now discoverable in the village.  The name of Merryweather occurs over the front of a grocer’s shop at the western extremity of Lupton.

“Of the infant Liston we find no events recorded before his fourth year, in which a severe attack of the measles bid fair to have robbed the rising generation of a fund of innocent entertainment.  He had it of the confluent kind, as it is called, and the child’s life was for a week or two despaired of.  His recovery he always attributes (under Heaven) to the humane interference of one Doctor Wilhelm Richter, a German empiric, who, in this extremity, prescribed a copious diet of sauer-kraut, which the child was observed to reach at with avidity, when other food repelled him; and from this change of diet his restoration was rapid and complete.  We have often heard him name the circumstance with gratitude; and it is not altogether surprising that a relish for this kind of aliment, so abhorrent and harsh to common English palates, has accompanied him through life.  When any of Mr. Listen’s intimates invite him to supper, he never fails of finding, nearest to his knife and fork, a dish of sauer-kraut.

“At the age of nine we find our subject under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Goodenough, (his father’s health not permitting him probably to instruct him himself,) by whom he was inducted into a competent portion of Latin and Greek, with some mathematics, till the death of Mr. Goodenough, in his own seventieth, and Master Liston’s eleventh year, put a stop for the present to his classical progress.