Having alluded to my first steps on the ladder of learning, it may not be amiss in this place to correct an assertion of my biographer in the Book of Gems, who states, that my education was finished at a certain suburban academy. In this ignorant world, where we proverbially live and learn, we may indeed leave off school, but our education only terminates with life itself. But even in a more limited sense, instead of my education being finished, my own impression is, that it never so much as progressed towards so desirable a consummation at any such establishment, although much invaluable time was spent at some of those institutions where young gentlemen are literally boarded, lodged, and _done for_. My very first essay was at one of those places, improperly called _semi_-naries, because they do not half teach anything; the principals being probably aware that the little boys are as often consigned to them to be “out of a mother’s way,” as for anything else. Accordingly, my memory presents but a very dim image of a pedagogical powdered head, amidst a more vivid group of females of a composite charter-part dry-nurse, part housemaid, and part governess,--with a matronly figure in the back ground, very like Mrs. S., allegorically representing, as Milton says, “our universal mother.” But there is no glimpse of Minerva. Of those pleasant associations with early school days, of which so much has been said and sung, there is little amongst my retrospections, excepting, perhaps, some sports which, like charity, might have been enjoyed at home, without the drawback of sundry strokes, neither apoplectic nor paralytic, periodical physic, and other unwelcome extras. I am not sure whether an invincible repugnance to early rising may not be attributable to our precocious wintry summonses, from a warm bed into a dim damp school-room, to play at filling our heads on an empty stomach; and perhaps I owe my decided sedentary habits to the disgust at our monotonous walks, or rather processions, or maybe to the sufferings of those longer excursions of big and little, where a pair of compasses had to pace as far and as fast as a pair of tongs. Nevertheless, I yet recall, with wonder, the occasional visits of grown-up ex-scholars to their old school, all in a flutter of gratitude and sensibility at recognising the spot where they had been caned, and horsed, and flogged, and fagged, and brimstone-and-treacled, and blackdosed and stickjawed, and kibed, and fined,--where they had caught the measles and the mumps, and been overtasked, and undertaught--and then, by way of climax, sentimentally offering a presentation snuff-box to their revered preceptor, with an inscription, ten to one, in dog Latin on the lid!