Several literary men of eminence have from time to time suggested to me that I ought to write my memoirs, but I have long held the opinion that such works have scarcely a legitimate interest for one’s contemporaries. Now, however, that I have exceeded, by fourteen years, the age of man, I begin to regard the opinion of others, and to look upon myself as a sort of incipient posterity, and am disposed to make the experiment of placing some portion of my life on record.

Most people who attain to birth, parentage, and education, find the latter the most doubtful of the three, even the first being somewhat uncertain. For myself, there is a tradition in my family that I was born by candle-light on the 10th of March, 1809: it was at midnight, and in the town of Leeds.

To keep those in order who believe too much, Nature has issued a series of minds that believe too little, and I am one of these; I could prove to the satisfaction of any free metaphysician that I have never existed at all, and that I am a mere optical illusion, like the rest of my fellow-men.

As to my parentage, I believe in that implicitly. But who else would be so credulous, if it were to his interest to prove the reverse?

As to my education, it has been as scanty as that of the best of us; it would be too great a joke to suppose that eighty years is a sufficient time for the acquisition of any knowledge worth naming. Herschel, for example, discovered the planet Uranus; that educated him, though it had been in the place where he found it for countless millions of years.

The educated are those who appreciate things at their true value; culture does not merely signify knowledge, but its acquisition in the utmost detail.

My father was said to have a musical genius, and rumour handed down that my mother fell in love with him on that account. She was the most emotional woman that I ever had the pleasure of knowing, and I can understand her marrying at the age of thirty-three a youth of nineteen, which she did; but I cannot understand my father at his age marrying her.

I had a sister; she was the firstborn, and a brother who came after me.

My father died at the age of twenty-six; he got his feet wet in the snow, took a chill, and went regularly through all the stages of inflammation.

I was three years and three months old when my father died; I remember him, also his house, both inside and out, and the square where it stood, at Sidmouth. But I have only one vision of these things; it is always the same, that of the father, the house, and the square.

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