Who was Richard Whittington? We know him well in his later career as a Mercer, and as a pious and patriotic citizen; but whence came he? Was he the poor and friendless lad of legend? Well, not quite that. Poor, perhaps, because he was the youngest of three brothers; but not friendless, for his family was of no mean descent. His father, Sir William Whittington, had an estate on which he lived, at Pauntley, in Gloucestershire, and other possessions of the family were at Sollers Hope, Herefordshire. Misfortunes fell upon Sir William, who seems to have died not long after Dick was born; but the family had friends in the FitzWarrens, of whom one, Sir John, was a prominent Mercer in London. Dick’s brothers had, as elder brothers have nowadays, the best chances, as it seemed, and remained in the country, enjoying the family property, or following rural employments. Dick we may readily picture as being sent to FitzWarren, to learn a trade. The great man probably took him for old acquaintance’ sake, and, having received the lad of thirteen, and turned him over to one of his many underlings, promptly forgot him. It is a way with the great, not yet obsolete. We may with a good conscience reject that part of the legend which tells how Dick was found, an obscure waif and stray, on FitzWarren’s doorstep, and taken, in compassion, to serve as a scullion. The pantomimes always insist on this, and on the ferocious cook’s ill-treatment of him; but pantomime librettists have many sins to answer for. No; Dick was an apprentice, a poor one, and doubtless taken without a premium; but not scullion. There can be little doubt that the country lad, thus thrown into the midst of many other apprentices in FitzWarren’s house, must have been an object of sport. They would taunt him with his country ways, and, superior in their clothes of London cut, ridicule, with the cruel satire of boys, his homely duds. Possibly his flight had some such origin as this. But it is chiefly on the legend of the cat that more or less learned antiquaries have so savagely fallen, with intent to explain it away. The cat, they assure us, was a fable, and they go on to say that it was from coal vessels called “cats,” in which Whittington embarked his money, that the story grew. Another school of commentators, eager to reduce the pretty tale to commonplace, tell us that it originated in the old French word for a purchase, _achat_. To what shifts will they not proceed in this hunt for an ignoble realism! Whittington is not known to have engaged in the ownership of colliers, or in the carrying of coal. A Mercer has no commerce with such things. Then, that derivation from the French _does_ smell of the lamp, does it not?