Although we were schoolfellows, my acquaintance with young Newcome at the seat of learning where we first met was very brief and casual. He had the advantage of being six years the junior of his present biographer, and such a difference of age between lads at a public school puts intimacy out of the question—a junior ensign being no more familiar with the Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards, or a barrister on his first circuit with my Lord Chief Justice on the bench, than the newly breeched infant in the Petties with a senior boy in a tailed coat. As we “knew each other at home,” as our school phrase was, and our families being somewhat acquainted, Newcome’s maternal uncle, the Rev. Charles Honeyman (the highly gifted preacher, and incumbent of Lady Whittlesea’s Chapel, Denmark Street, Mayfair), when he brought the child, after the Christmas vacation of 182-, to the Grey Friars’ school, recommended him in a neat complimentary speech to my superintendence and protection. My uncle, Major Pendennis, had for a while a seat in the chapel of this sweet and popular preacher, and professed, as a great number of persons of fashion did, a great admiration for him—an admiration which I shared in my early youth, but which has been modified by maturer judgment. Mr. Honeyman told me, with an air of deep respect, that his young nephew’s father, Colonel Thomas Newcome, C.B., was a most gallant and distinguished officer in the Bengal establishment of the Honourable East India Company;—and that his uncles, the Colonel’s half-brothers, were the eminent bankers, heads of the firm of Hobson Brothers and Newcome, Hobson Newcome, Esquire, Bryanstone Square, and Marblehead, Sussex, and Sir Brian Newcome, of Newcome and Park Lane, “whom to name,” says Mr. Honeyman, with the fluent eloquence with which he decorated the commonest circumstances of life, “is to designate two of the merchant princes of the wealthiest city the world has ever known; and one, if not two, of the leaders of that aristocracy which rallies round the throne of the most elegant and refined of European sovereigns.” I promised Mr. Honeyman to do what I could for the boy; and he proceeded to take leave of his little nephew in my presence in terms equally eloquent, pulling out a long and very slender green purse, from which he extracted the sum of two-and-sixpence, which he presented to the child, who received the money with rather a queer twinkle in his blue eyes. After that day’s school, I met my little _protégé_ in the neighbourhood of the pastrycook’s, regaling himself with raspberry-tarts. “You must not spend all that money, sir, which your uncle gave you,” said I (having perhaps even at that early age a slightly satirical turn), “in tarts and ginger-beer.” The urchin rubbed the raspberry-jam off his mouth, and said, “It don’t matter, sir, for I’ve got lots more.”