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A PECULIAR interest belongs to the childhood of a man who has afterwards become famous, for just

so is the boy in his tastes and tendencies prophetic of the man. It is so easy to feel the truth of this afterwards, so difficult to appreciate it at the time. They were all children once―these famous writers and lawyers and statesmen; but it is more than probable that hardly any of those who knew them in their early days were able to dissociate them from the other children with whom they worked and played. Their mothers, no doubt, felt convinced that they were the cleverest and most attractive of all conceivable boys; but then, so do all mothers, and we can, therefore, give them no credit for acumen.

Now, it is not part of my present task to emphasize the importance and originality of Lewis Carroll's work. That has been done already by men who have far more right than I to speak on such a subject. Enough for me that he made a definite mark upon his generation. It is my aim, in this little paper, to show the beginnings of those talents which distinguished his later literary work, and the means that I shall use are the writings and drawings which he himself produced when he was a boy.

Miss Beatrice Hatch, to whom we are all indebted for some delightful reminiscences of Lewis Carroll, which appeared in The Strand Magazine last April, alluded to this early literary work of his, but only cursorily. I am able to speak more fully on the subject, as the work of writing his biography^[1] has devolved upon my unworthy shoulders, and has thus made it necessary for me to examine the mass of unpublished writings and sketches which he left behind him.

When the boy was about eleven years old, his father, afterwards Archdeacon Dodgson, was presented to the living of Croft. Shortly after this Lewis Carroll began to show great taste for drawing; he kept a little book in which he used to sketch roughly any humorous ideas that occurred to him, and these pictures were afterwards painted by his brothers and sisters, who all regarded him as a paragon of wit and cleverness. No wonder, for from the first he was always the leader in their amusements, and was continually inventing all sorts of games to please himself and them.

In "The Deceitfull Coachman" we have one of these early drawings of his. It represents a scene which is, I hope, uncommon enough nowadays, though, as Dickens bears witness, it was no rare occurrence fifty years ago. A