So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.