1 7 6 RISEN B Y PERSE VERANCE. 



*He was a handsome, curly-headed lad, full of animation 

 and animal spirits. . . . Depend on it, he was quite a self- 

 made man, and his wonderful knowledge and command of 

 the English language must have been acquired by long and 

 patient study after leaving his last school.' 



For a short time after leaving Wellington Academy, he 

 attended another school; then he entered the office of Mr. 

 MoUoy in New Square, Lincoln's Inn, as a clerk, from which 

 he removed to the office of Mr. Edward Blackmore, attorney, 

 Gray's Inn. He entered this latter post in May 1827, and 

 left in November 1828. His salary as an office lad at first 

 amounted to thirteen shillings and sixpence, afterwards rising 

 to fifteen shillings. The fact of his father having become a 

 newspaper Parliamentary reporter for the Morm?ig Chronicle 

 may have decided him in the study of short-hand. *The 

 changes that were rung upon dots,' he writes, ' which in such 

 a position meant such a thing, and in such another position 

 something else entirely different ; the wonderful vagaries that 

 were played by circles ; the unaccountable consequences that 

 resulted from marks like flies' legs; the tremendous effects 

 of a curve in a wrong place, not only troubled my waking 

 hours, but reappeared before me in my sleep. When I had 

 groped my way blindly through these difficulties, and had 

 mastered the alphabet, there then appeared a procession of 

 new horrors, called arbitrary characters — the most despotic 

 characters I have ever known; who insisted, for instance, 

 that the thing like the beginning of a cobweb meant expec- 

 tation, and that a pen-and-ink sky-rocket stood for disadvan- 

 tageous. When I had fixed these wretches in my mind, I 

 found that they had driven everything else out of it; then, 

 beginning again, I forgot them ; while I was picking them 



