It happens, by Fors’ appointment, that the piece of my early life which I have already written for this month’s letter, sufficiently answers the imputation of my dislike to lords and squires. But I will preface it, in order to illustrate my dislike of clergymen, by a later bit of biography; which, at the rate of my present progress in giving account of myself, I should otherwise, as nearly as I can calculate, reach only about the year 1975. Last summer, in Rome, I lodged at the Hotel de Russie; and, in the archway of the courtyard of that mansion, waited usually, in the mornings, a Capuchin friar, begging for his monastery. Now, though I greatly object to any clergyman’s coming and taking me by the throat, and saying ‘Pay me that thou owest,’ I never pass a begging friar without giving him sixpence, or the equivalent fivepence of foreign coin;—extending the charity even occasionally as far as tenpence, if no fivepenny-bit chance to be in my purse. And this particular begging friar having a gentle face, and a long white beard, and a beautiful cloak, like a blanket; and being altogether the pleasantest sight, next to Sandro Botticelli’s Zipporah, I was like to see in Rome in the course of the day, I always gave him the extra fivepence for looking so nice; which generosity so worked on his mind,—(the more usual English religious sentiment in Rome expending itself rather in buying poetical pictures of monks than in filling their bellies),—that, after some six or seven doles of tenpences, he must needs take my hand one day, and try to kiss it. Which being only just able to prevent, I took him round the neck and kissed his lips instead: and this, it seems, was more to him than the tenpences, for, next day, he brought me a little reliquary, with a certificated fibre in it of St. Francis’ cloak, (the hair one, now preserved at Assisi); and when afterwards I showed my friend Fra Antonio, the Assisi sacristan, what I had got, it was a pleasure to see him open his eyes, wider than Monsieur the Syndic at Hansli’s fifty thousand crowns. He thought I must have come by it dishonestly; but not I, a whit,—for I most carefully explained to the Capuchin, when he brought it me, that I was more a Turk than a Catholic;—but he said I might keep the reliquary, for all that. Contenting myself, for the moment, with this illustration of my present dislike of clergymen, I return to earlier days. But for the reader’s better understanding of such further progress of my poor little life as I may trespass on his patience in describing, it is now needful that I give some account of my father’s mercantile position in London. The firm of which he was head partner may be yet remembered by some of the older city houses, as carrying on their business in a small counting-house on the first floor of narrow premises, in as narrow a thoroughfare of East London,—Billiter Street, the principal traverse from Leadenhall Street into Fenchurch Street.