EARLY LIFE. 5 



most distinguished for close argument and extreme 

 quickness and readiness in reply sometimes seasoned 

 with perhaps a little too much sarcasm. I have said 

 we took a tutor to Brougham, but really he was 

 more wanted for my two other sons, because Henry 

 always did his work by himself, scorning assistance, 

 and never applying for help when he could possibly 

 avoid it." 



Among the earliest of my own recollections is the 

 account my father's mother gave me of the circum- 

 stance which led to her son's marriage with my 

 mother. 



My grandmother was born in Queen Anne's reign, 

 so that I have conversed with a person who was alive 

 a hundred and eighty years ago, and who might have 

 heard her relative, Ann Brougham, who lived to the 

 age of a hundred and six, speak of events that hap- 

 pened in Queen Elizabeth's time ! This is only con- 

 jecture ; but it is at all events a certain fact that I, 

 now writing in the latter half of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, have heard my grandmother, being, at the time 

 I refer to, about ninety years of age, relate all the 

 circumstances of the execution of Charles L, as they 

 had been told to her by an eyewitness who stood 

 opposite to Whitehall and saw the King come out 

 upon the scaffold. I think the story was told to her 

 about the year 1720, and she talked of her informant 

 as having been quite old enough at the time of the 

 execution to have carried away a clear and accurate 



