On Michaelmas-day in the year 1758, the wife of the rector of Burnham Thorpe was delivered of a sickly boy. At that moment Anson was in command of the Channel fleet, and there were old men then in England who had seen Prince Rupert. Exactly a quarter of a century had elapsed since Admiral Byng had surrendered life. Russell, who beat Tourville at La Hogue, had been asleep in the grave for more than thirty years. Churchill, and Dilkes, the terror of Frenchmen and Spaniards in his day, had been at rest for just half a century. These were great men; but in 1758 a greater than all was born in the quiet rectory of Burnham Thorpe. That feeble boy, accepted and tolerated rather than welcomed and cherished, grew up in the possession of all the virtues of the above heroes and with but few of their failings: he had the dashing spirit of Rupert without his imprudence: he possessed the wisdom and valour of Byng without his cold-heartedness: he was as persevering as Anson and in no wise so foolish--as rapid as Russell, but not so rapacious: he was even more enterprising and successful than Dilkes; and, as with the gallant brother of Marlborough, his services claimed high honours long before he obtained them. This puny fragile child, born to achieve such greatness--this almost neglected son of a Norfolk parson, and, by his mother, grandson of a Westminster prebendary--designed, as it were, by nature to be a student, ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,’ and to cultivate learned leisure in trim gardens--this feeble instrument was born with a great mission: let the splendour of its fulfilment make us forgetful of his very few errors!