I have been reading the “Memorials of Hood” by his children,* and wonder whether the book will have the same interest for others and for younger people, as for persons of my own age and calling.  Books of travel to any country become interesting to us who have been there.  Men revisit the old school, though hateful to them, with ever so much kindliness and sentimental affection.  There was the tree under which the bully licked you:  here the ground where you had to fag out on holidays, and so forth.  In a word, my dear sir, you are the most interesting subject to yourself, of any that can occupy your worship’s thoughts.  I have no doubt, a Crimean soldier, reading a history of that siege, and how Jones and the gallant 99th were ordered to charge or what not, thinks, “Ah, yes, we of the 100th were placed so and so, I perfectly remember.”  So with this memorial of poor Hood, it may have, no doubt, a greater interest for me than for others, for I was fighting, so to speak, in a different part of the field, and engaged, a young subaltern, in the Battle of Life, in which Hood fell, young still, and covered with glory.  “The Bridge of Sighs” was his Corunna, his Heights of Abraham—­sickly, weak, wounded, he fell in the full blaze and fame of that great victory.

     * Memorials of Thomas Hood.  Moxon, 1860. 2 vols.

What manner of man was the genius who penned that famous song?  What like was Wolfe, who climbed and conquered on those famous Heights of Abraham?  We all want to know details regarding men who have achieved famous feats, whether of war, or wit, or eloquence, or endurance, or knowledge.  His one or two happy and heroic actions take a man’s name and memory out of a crowd of names and memories.  Henceforth he stands eminent.  We scan him:  we want to know all about him; we walk round and examine him, are curious, perhaps, and think are we not as strong and tall and capable as yonder champion; were we not bred as well, and could we not endure the winter’s cold as well as he?  Or we look up with all our eyes of admiration; will find no fault in our hero:  declare his beauty and proportions perfect; his critics envious detractors, and so forth.  Yesterday, before he performed his feat, he was nobody.  Who cared about his birthplace, his parentage, or the color of his hair?  To-day, by some single achievement, or by a series of great actions to which his genius accustoms us, he is famous, and antiquarians are busy finding out under what schoolmaster’s ferule he was educated, where his grandmother was vaccinated, and so forth.  If half a dozen washing-bills of Goldsmith’s were to be found to-morrow, would they not inspire a general interest, and be printed in a hundred papers?  I lighted upon Oliver, not very long since, in an old Town and Country Magazine, at the Pantheon masquerade “in an old English habit.”  Straightway my imagination ran out to meet him, to look at him, to follow him about.  I forgot the names of scores of fine gentlemen of