MEMORIES OF MY LIFE 



CHAPTER I 

 PARENTAGE 



Birthplace Grandparents Dr. Erasmus Darwin Lunar Society 

 Captain Barclay Allardice Mrs. Schimmelpenninck 



T UST before the arrival of the letter in which my 

 | publisher asked me to write the memories of 

 my life, I happened to be reading Shakespeare's 

 Henry IV. and laughing over Falstaff s soliloquy after 

 the gross exaggerations by Justice Shallow of his own 

 youthful performances. It contained the sentence, 

 " Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this 

 vice of lying ! " Feeling the truth of his ejaculation, 

 I headed the first page of my memorandum-book 

 with those words as a warning, knowing how difficult 

 it is to be veracious about long-past events, threads 

 of imagination insinuating themselves among those 

 supplied by memory and becoming indistinguishable 

 from them. 



Many old notebooks and letters are, however, in 

 my possession which have helped me ; but my two 

 latest surviving sisters, whose minds were sure store- 

 houses of family events, and to whom I always 

 referred whenever I wanted a date or particulars of 

 a long-past -fact, are now both dead, the one at the 



