Youth is proverbially of a plastic nature, and the juvenile griffin, consequently, in the majority of instances, readily accommodates himself to the altered circumstances in which he is placed; but not so the man of mature years, to whose moral and physical organization forty or fifty winters have imparted their rigid and unmalleable influences. Griffins of this description, which commonly comprises bishops, judges, commanders-in-chief, and gentlemen sent out on special missions, &c., protract their griffinage commonly during the whole period of their stay in the country, and never acquire the peculiar knowledge which entitles them to rank with the initiated. The late most excellent Bishop Heber, for example, who to the virtues of a Christian added all the qualities which could adorn the scholar and gentleman, was nevertheless an egregious griffin, as a perusal of his delightful travels in India, written in all the singleness of his benevolent heart, must convince any one acquainted with the character of the country and the natives of India. Autobiographers love to begin _ab ovo_, and I see no reason why I should wholly deviate from a custom doubly sanctioned by reason and established usage. It is curious sometimes to trace the gradual development of character in “small” as well as in “great” men; to note the little incidents which often determine the nature of our future career, and describe the shootings of the young idea at that vernal season when they first begin to expand into trees of good or evil. In an old manor-house, not thirty miles from London, on a gloomy November day, I first saw the light. Of the home of my infancy I remember little but my nursery, a long, bare, whitewashed apartment, with a tall, diamond-paned window, half obscured by the funereal branches of a venerable yew-tree. This window looked out, I remember, on the village churchyard, thickly studded with the moss-grown memorials of successive generations. In that window-seat I used to sit for many a weary hour, watching the boys idling on the gravestones, the jackdaws wheeling their airy circles round the spire, or the parson’s old one-eyed horse cropping the rank herbage, which sprouted fresh and green above the silent dust of many a “village Hampden.” The recollections of infancy, like an old picture, become often dim and obscure, but here and there particular events, like bright lights and rich Rembrandt touches, remain deeply impressed, which seem to defy the effects of time; of this kind is a most vivid recollection I have of a venerable uncle of my mother’s, an old Indian, who lived with us, and whose knee I always sought when I could give nurse the slip. My great uncle Frank always welcomed me to his little _sanctum_ in the green parlour, and having quite an Arab’s notion of the sacred rights of hospitality, invariably refused to give me up when nurse, puffing and foaming, would waddle in to reclaim me. I shall never