Orthodox journalists may object to my assumption of their title. In my multifarious occupation and random life I have, as I see when I look back found my highest activity, and rendered my most serious services to others, in my occupation as a journalist--all the rest was fringe or failure. If I have been good for anything it was in connection with, or through my position on, the press. And it would be ungrateful and dishonest if I should omit to bear my testimony to the noble character and large sincerity of the great journal to which the most of my strength for more than twenty years has been given. If ever I had a noble impulse, aroused by wrongs that came to my knowledge during those years, a good cause to defend, or a public abuse to attack, "The Times" has never refused to give me room to tell my story, nor have I ever been expected to conform my views to those of the office, or shape my correspondence to any ulterior purpose; nor have I ever done so. And I consider it the greatest honor that has ever come to me to have been so many years in its service, and to have maintained the confidence of its direction. To my critics much that I have told may seem trivial. I cannot judge of what may interest others. I should hardly have believed that my life as a whole could interest a public that does not know me, and I am equally unable to judge of the value which its details may have to others. In default of any criterion beyond my own judgment, I have selected the items which had to me most importance, or had a marked influence on my life or an interest beyond myself. I have told things that will seem trite to Americans, and others that will be commonplace to Englishmen, but I have two publics to think of, differing in slight matters in their knowledge of things. In affixing to the book the portraits of myself, I have yielded my own opinion, which was opposed to it, to that of the publishers and my friends, who urged it. To me it seemed a vanity for one almost unknown to assume that a public would care what manner of man he might be, and that such an assumption should follow an expressed general desire; but the views of the publishers are imperative, and those of my friends weightier than my own. The drawing by Rowse was done about 1856, so that the interval between its doing and that by my daughter in 1900 included all the active period of my life, unless I except the Hungarian expedition. When the Rowse drawing was executed, Lowell said of it, "You have nothing to do for the rest of your life but to try to look like it." Since that time every friend I then had, except Rowse and Norton, is gone where I must soon follow. DEEPDENE, FRIMLEY GREEN, Surrey, England. CONTENTS CHAP. I. A NEW ENGLAND MOTHER AND HER FAMILY. II. NATURE WORSHIP--EARLY RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES. III. AN AMERICAN EDUCATION. IV. COLLEGE LIFE. V. ART STUDY IN AMERICA. VI. ART STUDY IN ENGLAND. VII. ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH. VIII. AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS.