At the time of my birth, we were in family three girls and two boys—Courtenay, Caroline (Caddy as she was always called), Charles, Charlotte, and myself. But one day, when I was between three and four, my mother asked me if I should not like a live doll to play with? Oh, rapture! Dolls were my passion, but a live doll!—the idea was ecstasy! How well I can recall my first sight of my youngest brother, seated on his nurse’s knee, crowned with one of those quilted contrivances of white satin and rosy pink, that seemed a link between a baby hat of the period and a pudding or bourlet of the olden time. Oh! how I then and there loved my live doll, my brother Cavendish—the little Benjamin of the family!—how I did love him with the love of more than half a century. How I love him still, though we no longer tread the earth together, and how fondly I cling to the hope of a reunion in that region— “Where those who left us dwell in joy sublime; And those we leave will come in God’s good time.” But to return to the members of our family.[8] My parents were Captain (afterwards Admiral) Sir Courtenay Boyle, second surviving son of Edmund, seventh Earl of Cork and Orrery, and Carolina Amelia, daughter of William Poyntz, of Midgham House, Berkshire. Footnote 8: Vice-Admiral The Hon. Sir Courtenay Boyle, born 1770; married 1799 Carolina Amelia, daughter of William Poyntz, Esq., of Midgham, Co. Berks; died May 1844. ISSUE OF ABOVE: Courtenay Edmund William, Capt. R.N., born 1800; married 1836 Mary, daughter of W. Wallace Ogle, Esq.; died 1859. Charles John, born 1806, died 1885; married 1849 Zacyntha Moore, daughter of General Sir Lorenzo Moore. Cavendish Spencer, born 1814; married 1844 Rose Susan, daughter of Captain C. Alexander, Royal Engineers; died 1868. Carolina, born 1803, died 1883. Mary Louisa, born 1810, died 1890. [Sidenote: “THE DIVINE PHILOSOPHER”] As this is a book of confessions as well as of reminiscences, I may as well make a clean breast of it at once, and own that I take a pride in ancestry, and love Heraldry and History, and many of the “ries,” even as scientific people love the “ologies.” I am proud of my descent because my forefathers were many of them great and good men; and I once boasted that I could find five of them in Biographical Dictionaries, inclusive of Robert Boyle, “the Divine Philosopher of the World,” who has been described in one of the aforesaid books as “the Father of Chemistry and the brother of the Earl of Cork.” I certainly admit, “that it is better to have a glory of your own, not borrowed of your fathers;” but surely it is better to have that than “none at all.” “I do not care about ancestry,” said my dear friend, Mayne Dickens, to me one day. “Well,” said I, “you are better off than any of us in that respect, for your great ancestor is still alive; but will not his children’s children glory in his name?”