“I had the good luck to be under Clough (the poet) and Fraser, now Bishop of Manchester, who were Oriel tutors at that time, and the latter of whom is still one of my closest friends. I went up, as I have said, believing myself still a Tory, but left Oxford a Radical. Something of the change was owing to the insolence of undergraduate life at that day, but more to a tour I took with a pupil through the North in the long vacation of my third year. My pupil was the son of a neighboring Berkshire squire, and all his father wanted was that I should keep him out of mischief. If he could be interested or taught anything, so much the better. We happened to stop at a Commercial hotel in Lancashire on our way North, and in the bagman’s room I got into an argument with some of the North county travellers on the subject of the Corn Laws, then prominently before Parliament. On this first night I came speedily to the conclusion that I knew very little about the matter, and before I returned to Oxford for Michaelmas term I had become a good free-trader. “I was nearly twenty-two when I went up to London, straight from Oxford, to begin my legal career. My father kindly suggested that I should take a run on the Continent before settling down, to get up my French and German to the point at any rate of tolerably fluent small talk, and here again I have no doubt but he was right, as the want of early training of ear and tongue has left me a helpless mortal ever since. However, I was determined to lose not a month or a week if I could help it, and soon found myself in small rooms on the third floor at No. 15 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, from the windows of which, on a fine day, I could see the Surrey hills. I paid £30 a year for the chambers, and lived in them for another £70, keeping down my whole expenditure within £100 a year, a feat I am still rather proud of. I never could have done it but for a glorious old woman who kept the house, and did for all the inhabitants, of whom only two lived in their chambers. She had come up from Devonshire as a girl some fifty years before to that house where she had been ever since, and in all that time had never seen the Thames, which is, as you know, not five minutes’ walk from Lincoln’s Inn Fields; nor St. Paul’s, except the dome, from the top windows of No. 15. She still spoke with a delightful Devonshire accent, all her U’s being as soft as if she had left Torquay yesterday, and I won her heart at once by professing, or I should say acknowledging, a passion for _junket_, which she prepared in a reverent and enthusiastic manner on the slightest excuse. As my wife that was to be lived in Devonshire, the coincidence was peculiarly grateful to me, and the dear old woman, Roxworthy by name, could not have had my interests more at heart had I been her own son.