I do not now know whether I regret the fact that my father’s means did not suffice to carry out that project. It might have diverted me from those things which I even then began to love, and have never ceased to care for. In any case it seemed obviously necessary that, as one of a family of ten, I should at once apply myself to a calling in which I could earn my living. Accordingly at the age of sixteen, when I quitted Bruce Castle School, my father articled me, at some considerable sacrifice to himself, in a stock-broker’s office in the City. It will be evident that the education with which I went forth into the world could not have been very profound--a little Latin, enough to enable me to read, in later years, Horace and Virgil with pleasure, but not without the aid of a dictionary; no Greek--that was not considered indispensable to a commercial career; mathematics sufficient, as my examiners told me, to have given me more than a fair chance of a scholarship at Cambridge; and a taste for literature mainly acquired in the vacant hours after school. From the first my task in the City was not congenial to me, although I worked hard and worked early and late. But when office hours were over I still contrived to keep alive that interest in books which had already been deeply implanted in me, and to make some small essays in journalism and in verse which at the first, I am bound to admit, met with scant encouragement from the editors whom I bombarded. I can remember now receiving from Charles Dickens, with a pain that was also blended with pleasure, a polite little note in blue ink returning one of my many rejected communications. Mr. Thackeray from the _Cornhill_ conferred upon me a like distinction--a distinction, as I call it, because even the fact that they declined to publish what I wrote seemed to me at the time almost to form a link of association with men whom I so greatly admired. All this tentative work was done in the late evenings, carried sometimes far into the night, but it did not prevent me from being at my office in the City at a quarter past nine, and remaining there always till six and sometimes, on account days, till nine and ten. At the same time I was greedily reading the works of the men I worshipped most--the drama, and the lyrical poetry of the Elizabethans; the novelists, starting with Sterne, Fielding, and Smollett; the poets of the great revival which ushered in the nineteenth century; and those later poets and writers, all of whom were then living, who gave to the Victorian era its glory.