But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age. I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods. In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library. This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.