papers he put into my hands some months before his death, and, together with them, a large number of old letters and a manuscript history of his life which he had begun to write when he was but seventeen years old. In fact, the abundance of the materials thus placed at my disposal was so great, that my chief difficulty has been to keep my part of the work at all within reasonable limits. If the “Prefatory Memoir” in which his early life was told had really been an Autobiography, I might well have hesitated, and hesitated long, before I ventured to rewrite it. So much of a man’s character is shown by his style, that even an imperfect life written by himself will, likely enough, be of far greater value than the most perfect life written by another. But, as will be seen later on,[2] so far as the style goes, this Memoir was in no sense autobiographical. It was, indeed, told in the first person; but “I had,” he said, “to devolve upon another the task of immediate composition.” I may add that his brother, who thus assisted him, had not at his command many of the materials which were afterwards placed at my disposal. My uncle had not at that time wished that a full account should be given of his early days, and he had not, therefore, thought it needful to lay before him either the letters or the fragment of an early autobiography which I have mentioned above. He had a strange unwillingness to let this history of his youthful days be seen. In a memorandum which he made a few years ago he says, “These memoirs of the early part of my life having been written, for the most part, when I was very young and ill-informed, contain much which I have since known to be ridiculous; and for this reason I have never shown them to any one—except, I think, a small portion to my wife. After some hesitation I have decided to preserve the memoirs for any use to which my executors may think proper to put them.” A far greater value is added to them by the fact that the author intended them for no other eye but his own. None of his brothers, I believe, even knew that he was writing them. He used, in late years, often to speak to me about them; but it was only a short time before his death that he could bring himself to let me read them. When he gave them to me he bade me remember that he was very young and ignorant when he wrote them. “You must not,” he said, “judge me harshly.” Happily I was soon able to tell him that, though I had been a great reader of autobiographies, there were few which had interested me more than his. I found nothing to dispose me to ridicule, but much that moved my pity, and still more that roused my admiration.