I must try the reader’s patience with some account of my beginnings in music,— the only art for which, in my own opinion, I was born with a real natural love; my poetry, such as it is, having sprung out of my deep feeling for music. While I was yet quite a child, my father happened to have an old lumbering harpsichord thrown on his hands, as part payment of a debt from some bankrupt customer; and when I was a little older, my mother, anxious to try my faculties in all possible ways, employed a youth who was in the service of a tuner in our neighbourhood, to teach me to play. My instructor, however, being young himself, was a good deal more given to romping and jumping than to music, and our time together was chiefly passed in vaulting over the tables and chairs of the drawing-room. The progress I made, therefore, was not such as to induce my mother to continue me in this instruction; and I left off, after acquiring little more than the power of playing two or three tunes with the right hand only. It was soon, however, discovered that I had an agreeable voice and taste for singing; and in the sort of gay life we led (for my mother was always fond of society), this talent of mine was frequently called into play to enliven our tea-parties and suppers. In the summer theatricals too, which I have already recorded, my singing of the songs of Patrick, in the Poor Soldier, —particularly of the duet with Norah, into which I threw a feeling far beyond my years,— was received with but too encouraging applause.