My father was a prosperous haberdasher in Cheapside, and I was his eldest son. My mother was the daughter of the clerk to the Fellmongers’ Company. She had reached the mature age of nine-and-twenty when she received an offer of matrimony from my father, and after much anxious consideration and much consultation with her parents, prudently decided to accept it, although to the end of her days she did not scruple openly to declare that she had lowered herself by marrying a man who was compelled to bow behind a counter to the wife of a grocer, and stand bareheaded at the carriage door of an alderman’s lady. My mother, I am sorry to say, abetted my natural aversion from trade and sent me to Saint Paul’s School to learn Latin, Greek, and the mathematicks that I might be qualified to separate myself from the class to which unhappily she was degraded and that she might recover in her child the pride she had lost in her husband. My abilities were not despicable, my ambition was restless, and my progress in my studies was therefore respectable. I conceived a genuine admiration for the classick authors; I was genuinely moved by the majesty of Homer and the felicity of expression in Horace. In due time I went to Oxford, and after the usual course there, in which I was not unsuccessful, I took Holy Orders and became a curate. When I was about eight-and-twenty I was presented with a College living in the village of A. about four miles from the county town of B. in the West of England. My parishioners were the squire, a half-pay captain in the army, a retired custom-house surveyor who was supposed to be the illegitimate son of a member of parliament, and the surrounding farmers and labourers. All were grossly illiterate, but I soon observed that a common ignorance does not prevent, but rather tends to establish artificial distinctions. Inferiority by a single degree in the social scale becomes not only a barrier to intercourse, but a sufficient reason for contempt. The squire and his lady spent their days in vain attempts to secure invitations to my Lord’s at the Abbey and revenged themselves by patronising the captain, who in his turn nodded to the surveyor but would on no account permit intimacy. The surveyor could not for his life have condescended to enter a farmhouse, and yet was never weary of denouncing as intolerably stuck-up the behaviour of those above him. He consoled himself by the reflection that they were the losers, and that, poor creatures, their neglect of him was due to a lamentable misapprehension of the dignity of H. M. Custom-house Service. I can assure you I thought the comedy played at A. very ridiculous, and often laughed at it.