and his Pilgrimage through our poor Nineteenth Century be one day
wanted by the world, and they can find some shadow of a true image

here, my swift scribbling (which shall be very swift and immediate)
may prove useful by and by.

CHAPTER II.
BIRTH AND PARENTAGE.

John Sterling was born at Kaimes Castle, a kind of dilapidated
baronial residence to which a small farm was then attached, rented by

his Father, in the Isle of Bute,--on the 20th July, 1806. Both his
parents were Irish by birth, Scotch by extraction; and became, as he

himself did, essentially English by long residence and habit. Of John
himself Scotland has little or nothing to claim except the birth and

genealogy, for he left it almost before the years of memory; and in
his mature days regarded it, if with a little more recognition and

intelligence, yet without more participation in any of its accents
outward or inward, than others natives of Middlesex or Surrey, where

the scene of his chief education lay.
The climate of Bute is rainy, soft of temperature; with skies of

unusual depth and brilliancy, while the weather is fair. In that soft
rainy climate, on that wild-wooded rocky coast, with its gnarled

mountains and green silent valleys, with its seething rain-storms and
many-sounding seas, was young Sterling ushered into his first

schooling in this world. I remember one little anecdote his Father
told me of those first years: One of the cows had calved; young John,

still in petticoats, was permitted to go, holding by his father's
hand, and look at the newly arrived calf; a mystery which he surveyed

with open intent eyes, and the silent exercise of all the scientific
faculties he had;--very strange mystery indeed, this new arrival, and

fresh denizen of our Universe: "Wull't eat a-body?" said John in his
first practical Scotch, inquiring into the tendencies this mystery

might have to fall upon a little fellow and consume him as provision:
"Will it eat one, Father?"--Poor little open-eyed John: the family

long bantered him with this anecdote; and we, in far other years,
laughed heartily on hearing it.--Simple peasant laborers, ploughers,

house-servants, occasional fisher-people too; and the sight of ships,
and crops, and Nature's doings where Art has little meddled with her:

this was the kind of schooling our young friend had, first of all; on
this bench of the grand world-school did he sit, for the first four

years of his life.
Edward Sterling his Father, a man who subsequently came to

considerable notice in the world, was originally of Waterford in
Munster; son of the Episcopalian Clergyman there; and chief

representative of a family of some standing in those parts. Family
founded, it appears, by a Colonel Robert Sterling, called also Sir

Robert Sterling; a Scottish Gustavus-Adolphus soldier, whom the
breaking out of the Civil War had recalled from his German

campaignings, and had before long, though not till after some
waverings on his part, attached firmly to the Duke of Ormond and to

the King's Party in that quarrel. A little bit of genealogy, since it
lies ready to my hand, gathered long ago out of wider studies, and

pleasantly connects things individual and present with the dim
universal crowd of things past,--may as well be inserted here as

thrown away.
This Colonel Robert designates himself Sterling "of Glorat;" I

believe, a younger branch of the well-known Stirlings of Keir in
Stirlingshire. It appears he prospered in his soldiering and other

business, in those bad Ormond times; being a man of energy, ardor and
intelligence,--probably prompt enough both with his word and with his

stroke. There survives yet, in the Commons Journals,[2] dim notice of
his controversies and adventures; especially of one controversy he had

got into with certain victorious Parliamentary official parties, while
his own party lay vanquished, during what was called the Ormond

Cessation, or Temporary Peace made by Ormond with the Parliament in
1646:--in which controversy Colonel Robert, after repeated

applications, journeyings to London, attendances upon committees, and
such like, finds himself worsted, declared to be in the wrong; and so

vanishes from the Commons Journals.
What became of him when Cromwell got to Ireland, and to Munster, I

have not heard: his knighthood, dating from the very year of
Cromwell's Invasion (1649), indicates a man expected to do his best on

the occasion:--as in all probability he did; had not Tredah Storm
proved ruinous, and the neck of this Irish War been broken at once.

Doubtless the Colonel Sir Robert followed or attended his Duke of
Ormond into foreign parts, and gave up his management of Munster,

while it was yet time: for after the Restoration we find him again,
safe, and as was natural, flourishing with new splendor; gifted,

recompensed with lands;--settled, in short, on fair revenues in those
Munster regions. He appears to have had no children; but to have left

his property to William, a younger brother who had followed him into
Ireland. From this William descends the family which, in the years we

treat of, had Edward Sterling, Father of our John, for its
representative. And now enough of genealogy.

Of Edward Sterling, Captain Edward Sterling as his title was, who in
the latter period of his life became well known in London political

society, whom indeed all England, with a curious mixture of mockery
and respect and even fear, knew well as "the Thunderer of the Times

Newspaper," there were much to be said, did the present task and its
limits permit. As perhaps it might, on certain terms? What is

indispensable let us not omit to say. The history of a man's
childhood is the description of his parents and environment: this is

his inarticulate but highly important history, in those first times,
while of articulate he has yet none.

Edward Sterling had now just entered on his thirty-fourth year; and
was already a man experienced in fortunes and changes. A native of

Waterford in Munster, as already mentioned; born in the "Deanery House
of Waterford, 27th February, 1773," say the registers. For his

Father, as we learn, resided in the Deanery House, though he was not
himself Dean, but only "Curate of the Cathedral" (whatever that may

mean); he was withalrector of two other livings, and the Dean's
friend,--friend indeed of the Dean's kinsmen the Beresfords generally;

whose grand house of Curraghmore, near by Waterford, was a familiar
haunt of his and his children's. This reverend gentleman, along with

his three livings and high acquaintanceships, had inherited political
connections;--inherited especially a Government Pension, with

survivorship for still one life beyond his own; his father having been
Clerk of the Irish House of Commons at the time of the Union, of which

office the lost salary was compensated in this way. The Pension was
of two hundred pounds; and only expired with the life of Edward,

John's Father, in 1847. There were, and still are, daughters of the
family; but Edward was the only son;--descended, too, from the

Scottish hero Wallace, as the old gentleman would sometimes admonish
him; his own wife, Edward's mother, being of that name, and boasting

herself, as most Scotch Wallaces do, to have that blood in her veins.
This Edward had picked up, at Waterford, and among the young

Beresfords of Curraghmore and elsewhere, a thoroughly Irish form of
character: fire and fervor, vitality of all kinds, in genial

abundance; but in a much more loquacious, ostentatious, much _louder_
style than is freely patronized on this side of the Channel. Of Irish

accent in speech he had entirely divested himself, so as not to be
traced by any vestige in that respect; but his Irish accent of

character, in all manner of other more important respects, was very
recognizable. An impetuous man, full of real energy, and immensely

conscious of the same; who transacted everything not with the minimum
of fuss and noise, but with the maximum: a very Captain Whirlwind, as

one was tempted to call him.
In youth, he had studied at Trinity College, Dublin; visited the Inns

of Court here, and trained himself for the Irish Bar. To the Bar he
had been duly called, and was waiting for the results,--when, in his

twenty-fifth year, the Irish Rebellion broke out; whereupon the Irish
Barristers decided to raise a corps of loyal Volunteers, and a

complete change introduced itself into Edward Sterling's way of life.
For, naturally, he had joined the array of Volunteers;--fought, I have

heard, "in three actions with the rebels" (Vinegar Hill, for one); and
doubtless fought well: but in the mess-rooms, among the young

military and civil officials, with all of whom he was a favorite, he
had acquired a taste for soldier life, and perhaps high hopes of

succeeding in it: at all events, having a commission in the