BIOGRAPHY. 5 



Oliver Cromwell, Charles Stuart, " Dutch William " (mostly 

 associated witli the " Hanoverian " rat and the national 

 debt), and other personages celebrated in historj''. 



Deeply as he felt the indignities to v/hich he and his 

 family and co-religionists had been subjected, and fre- 

 quently as he referred to them, both in writing and con- 

 versation, he never used a worse weapon than irony, and 

 even that was tempered by an underlying current of 

 humour. He had felt the wounds, but he could jest at 

 the scars. 



On principle he refused to qualify as Deputy-Lieu- 

 tenant and magistrate, because he had been debarred from 

 doing so previously to the Emancipation Act. His son, 

 however, serves both offices. 



Born in 1782, he spent his childish years in the old 

 mansion and grounds of the family, and at a very early age 

 displayed those powers of observation, love of nature and 

 enterprise, which enabled him to earn a place among the 

 first order of practical naturalists both at home and abroad. 



At ten years of age he was placed under the Eev. A. 

 Strong's care, in a school just founded at Tudhoe, a village 

 near Durham. Prom Waterton's reminiscences, his in- 

 structor seems to have inclined to the severe order of dis- 

 cipline, and to have been rather liberal of the birch, of 

 which instrument Waterton had his full share. His 

 account of storming the larder for the support of hungry 

 inmates ; of the anxious glances which he cast in the 

 morning to judge by the master's wig of the state of his 

 temper ; and of being captured in the very act of getting 

 through a barred window, is exceedingly humorous. 



He also relates two anecdotes, both telling against him- 

 self, and both prospective, as it were, of the celebrated 

 fact of riding on the back of a cayman and of his ship- 



