CHAPTER VI.
COMMENCEMENT OF THE MOST VALUABLE FRIENDSHIP OF MY LIFE. MY FATHER’S DEATH. WRITINGS AND OTHER PROCEEDINGS UP TO 1840.
IT was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year. With her husband’s family it was the renewal of an old acquaintanceship. His grandfather lived in the next house to my father’s in Newington Green, and I had, sometimes when a boy, been invited to play in the old gentleman’s garden. He was a fine specimen of the old Scotch Puritan; stern, severe, and powerful, but very kind to children, on whom such men make a lasting impression. Although it was years after my introduction to Mrs. Taylor before my acquaintance with her became at
