“At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic.  From his cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond the genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his favorite groves.  It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however favorable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, etc., is but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later generation.  Hypochondria almost constantly ensues.  It was so in the case of the young Liston.  He was subject to sights, and had visions.  Those arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervor of strict Calvinistic notions.  In the glooms of Charnwood he was assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the famous Anthony of Padua.  Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude themselves upon his sensorium.  Whether he shut his eyes or kept them open, the same illusions operated.  The darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions.  They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata.  We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon influenced his future destiny.

“On the death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, we find him received into the family of Mr. Willoughby, an eminent Turkey merchant, resident in Birchin Lane, London.  We lose a little while here the chain of his history,—­by what inducements this gentleman was determined to make him an inmate of his house.  Probably he had had some personal kindness for Mrs. Sittingbourn formerly; but however it was, the young man was here treated more like a son than a clerk, though he was nominally but the latter.  Different avocations, the change of scene, with that alternation of business and recreation which in its greatest perfection is to be had only in London, appear to have weaned him in a short time from the hypochondriacal affections which had beset him at Charnwood.

“In the three years which followed his removal to Birchin Lane, we find him making more than one voyage to the Levant, as chief factor for Mr. Willoughby at the Porte.  We could easily fill our biography with the pleasant passages which we have heard him relate as having happened to him at Constantinople, such as his having been taken up on suspicion of a design of penetrating the seraglio, etc.; but, with the deepest convincement of this gentleman’s own veracity, we think that some of the stories are of that whimsical, and others of that romantic nature, which, however diverting, would be out of place in a narrative of this kind, which aims not only at strict truth, but at avoiding the very appearance of the contrary.