of my enthusiastic admiration of Goethe’s and Schiller’s plays (which, however, I could only read in French or English translations, for I then knew no German) and my earnest desire to write a good play myself, the idea of making the stage my profession had entirely passed from my mind, which was absorbed with the wish and endeavor to produce a good dramatic composition.  The turn I had exhibited for acting at school appeared to have evaporated, and Covent Garden itself never occurred to me as a great institution for purposes of art or enlightened public recreation, but only as my father’s disastrous property, to which his life was being sacrificed; and every thought connected with it gradually became more and more distasteful to me.  It appears to me curious, that up to this time, I literally knew nothing of Shakespeare, beyond having seen one or two of his plays acted; I had certainly never read one of them through, nor did I do so until some time later, when I began to have to learn parts in them by heart.

I think the rather serious bias which my mind had developed while I was still in Scotland tended probably to my greater contentment in my home, and to the total disinclination which I should certainly now have felt for a life of public exhibition.  My dramatic reading and writing was curiously blended with a very considerable interest in literature of a very different sort, and with the perusal of such works as Mason on “Self-Knowledge,” Newton’s “Cardiphonia,” and a great variety of sermons and religious essays.  My mother, observing my tendency to reading on religious subjects, proposed to me to take my first communion.  She was a member of the Swiss Protestant Church, the excellent pastor of which, the Rev. Mr. S——­, was our near neighbor, and we were upon terms of the friendliest intimacy with him and his family.  In his church I received the sacrament for the first time, but I do not think with the most desirable effect.  The only immediate result that I can remember of this increase of my Christian profession and privileges was, I am sorry to say, a rigid pharisaical formalism, which I carried so far as to decline accompanying my father and mother to our worthy clergyman’s house, one Sunday, when we were invited to spend the evening with him and his family.  This sort of acrid fruit is no uncommon first harvest of youthful religious zeal; and I suppose my parents and my worthy pastor thought it a piece of unripe, childish, impertinent conscientiousness, hardly deserving a serious rebuke.

Another of my recollections which belong to this time is seeing several times at our house that exceedingly coarse, disagreeable, clever, and witty man, Theodore Hook.  I always had a dread of his loud voice, and blazing red face, and staring black eyes; especially as on more than one occasion his after-dinner wit seemed to me fitter for the table he had left than the more refined atmosphere of the drawing-room.  One day he dined with us to meet my cousin Horace