Excerpt from Essays Political and Biographical MY father told me once that one of his earliest recol lections was of a visit to the new house which my grand father had bought at Ealing. He must have been about four or five years old at the time, and, to a child born in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, the small house standing in green fields with the purple wisteria climb ing up over one side appeared an earthly paradise. The deep meaning of the occasion was enhanced by my grandfather's first great confidence. He told his little son that although my grandmother was aware of the purchase, and that the house was being made ready for occupation, she did not know that a certain room on the ground floor with a window on the garden was being made into a boudoir for her use. My father, exhorted to preserve the utmost secrecy, was taken into this room and consulted as to the choice of a paper. He did not know till long afterwards that the country house (for Ealing was in the country then) had been bought because he was so delicate a child that my grandparents feared they would not rear him in the London atmosphere. Thirty years later, when I first remember. The place, London had crept along the Uxbridge Road almost as far as Acton, and the Common was already surrounded with buildings. Now, of course, it is London all the way, and the terminus of the District Railway. But when first I knew it my grandfather's place was perhaps much the same as it had been in my father's childhood. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.