12 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



thought I was cut out for a doctor. Indeed, I should 

 have taken to the study of medicine had not my uncle 

 Richard (Dr. Richard Roscoe) strongly dissuaded my 

 mother from allowing me to do so, urging that it 

 was an extremely arduous profession which would 

 probably kill me. 



After my father's death we left the large house and 

 went into a small cottage close by. My grandfather 

 Fletcher and his two daughters Harriet and Louisa 

 lived near. The latter kept a boarding-school for 

 girls. Their earliest pupils were the daughters of the 

 first Lord Denman, and I remember well as a small 

 boy playing with them and many others, some of whom 

 I now know as charming old ladies. Close by my 

 aunt's house was " The Nook," the old-fashioned 

 residence of the Unitarian minister of the ancient 

 Presbyterian chapel in Gateacre. I may remark here 

 that my forbears on both sides came of Presbyterian 

 or Unitarian stock, one of my great-grandfathers on 

 my mother's side being Dr. Enfield, the author of the 

 justly famous Enfield's Speaker. The incumbent of 

 Gateacre chapel was Dr. William Shepherd, a literary 

 friend of Lord Brougham. He wrote the Life of 

 Poggio Bracciolini, a copy of which, presented to my 

 mother by the author, is now in my possession. It 

 attracted much attention at the time. It was trans- 

 lated into German, French, and Italian, but unfortu- 

 nately the German manuscript, which had been put 

 into the hands of a printer at Berlin, was lost in the 

 confusion which followed upon the conquest of 

 Prussia by Napoleon. Dr. Shepherd kept a school 

 for boys, to which my Roscoe uncles, the Booths, the 

 Thornelys, and a number of the sons of the best 

 Liverpool Nonconformist families were sent. A severe 

 disciplinarian of the old school, he used to tweak the 



