On Mr. Galton’s topic of hereditary talent I have little to report as to myself.  Neither father nor mother had any leanings either towards verse or prose; but my mother was an excellent pianiste and a fair landscape painter both in oils and water-colour; also she drew and printed on stone, and otherwise showed that she came of an artistic family.  As to my father’s surroundings, his brother Peter, a consul-general in Spain, wrote a tragedy called Pelayo; and I possess half-a-dozen French songs, labelled by my father “in my late dear father’s handwriting,” but whether or not original, I cannot tell.  As a Guernseyman, he might well be as much French as English.  They seem to me clever and worthy of Beranger, though long before him:  possibly they are my grandsire’s.  A very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr. John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are excellent, and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when he was a boy.

About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals so with men, “fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;” this so far as bodies are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable instances prove, where children do not take after their parents.  If, however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary talent, or at all events authorship, is hereditary, especially in these days of that general epidemic, the “cacoethes scribendi.”

* * * * *

I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and as I cannot improve upon it, and it has never been printed in England, I produce it here in its integrity.

A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class were more than sixty-five years ago cannot fail to have much to interest the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because we may now indulge in the self-complacency of being everyway wiser, better, and happier than our recent forebears.  And in setting myself to write these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against or for either the dead or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom “schools and schoolmasters.”  It is true that sometimes I loved them not, neither can I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood’s hard experience has not been altogether that of their own boys.

I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in “little Latin and less Greek” of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an epitaph on himself the following effusion: