Whilst I was at Charterhouse, occurred my first Continental journey, when my excellent father took his small party all through France in his private travelling carriage, bought at Calais for the trip (it was long before railways were invented), and I jotted down in verse our daily adventures in the rumble.  The whole journal, entitled “Rough Rhymes,” in divers metres, grave and gay, was published by the “Literary Chronicle” in 1826, and the editor thereof, Mr. Jerdan, says, after some compliments, “the author is in his sixteenth year,”—­which fixes the date.  Possibly, a brief specimen or two of this may please:  take the livelier first,—­on French cookery:  if trivial, the lines are genuine:  I must not doctor anything up even by a word.

    “Now Muse, you must versify your very best,
    To sing how they ransack the East and the West,
    To tell how they plunder the North and the South
    For food for the stomach and zest for the mouth! 
    Such savoury stews, and such odorous dishes,
    Such soups, and (at Calais) such capital fishes! 
    With sauces so strange they disguise the lean meat
    That you seldom, or never, know what you’re to eat;
    Such fricandeaux, fricassees epicurean,
    Such vins-ordinaires, and such banquets Circean,—­
    And the nice little nothings which very soon vanish
    Before you are able your plate to replenish,—­
    Such exquisite eatables! and for your drink
    Not porter or ale, but—­what do you think? 
    ’Tis Burgundy, Bourdeaux, real red rosy wine,
    Which you quaff at a draught, neat nectar, divine! 
    Thus they pamper the taste with everything good
    And of an old shoe can make savoury food,
    But the worst of it is that when you have done
    You are nearly as famish’d as when you begun!”

For a more serious morsel, take the closing lines on Rouen:—­

    “Yes, proud Cathedral, ages pass’d away
    While generations lived their little day,—­
    France has been deluged with her patriots’ blood
    By traitors to their country and their God,—­
    The face of Europe has been changed, but thou
    Hast stood sublime in changelessness till now,
    Exulting in thy glories of carved stone,
    A living monument of ages gone!—­
    Yet—­time hath touch’d thee too; thy prime is o’er,—­
    A few short years, and thou must be no more;
    Ev’n thou must bend beneath the common fate,
    But in thy very ruins wilt be great!”

More than enough of this brief memory of “Sixty Years Since,” which has no other extant record, and is only given as a sample of the rest, equally juvenile.  Three years however before, this, my earliest piece printed, I find among my papers a very faded copy of my first MS. in verse, being part of an attempted prize poem at Charterhouse on Carthage, written at the age of thirteen in 1823; for auld langsyne’s sake I rescue its conclusion thus curtly from oblivion,—­though no doubt archaeologically faulty:—­