As a Guernseyman, he might well be as much French as English.

They seem to me clever and worthy of Beranger, though long before him: possibly they are my grandsire's.

A very fair judge of French poetry, and himself a good Norman poet, Mr.
John Sullivan of Jersey writes and tells me that the songs are excellent, and that he remembers them to have been popularly sung when he was a boy.
About the matter of hereditary bias itself, we know that as with animals so with men, "fortes creantur fortibus, et bonis;" this so far as bodies are concerned; but surely spirits are more individual, as innumerable instances prove, where children do not take after their parents.

If, however, I may mention my own small experience of this matter, literary talent, or at all events authorship, _is_ hereditary, especially in these days of that general epidemic, the "cacoethes scribendi." * * * * * I wrote this paper following originally for an American publication; and as I cannot improve upon it, and it has never been printed in England, I produce it here in its integrity.
A true and genuine record of what English schools of the highest class were more than sixty-five years ago cannot fail to have much to interest the present generation on both sides of the Atlantic; if only because we may now indulge in the self-complacency of being everyway wiser, better, and happier than our recent forebears.

And in setting myself to write these early revelations, I wish at once to state that, although at times necessarily naming names (for the too frequent use of dashes and asterisks must otherwise destroy the verisimilitude of plain truth-telling), I desire to say nothing against or for either the dead or the living beyond their just deserts, and I protest against any charge of unreasonable want of charity as to my whilom "schools and schoolmasters." It is true that sometimes I loved them not, neither can I in general respect their memory; but the causes of such a feeling on my part shall be made manifest anon, and I am sure that modern parents and guardians will rejoice that much of my childhood's hard experience has not been altogether that of their own boys.
I was sent to school much too soon, at the early age of seven, having previously had for my home tutor a well-remembered day-teacher in "little Latin and less Greek" of the name of Swallow, whom I thought a wit and a poet in those days because one morning he produced as an epitaph on himself the following effusion: "Beneath this stone a Swallow lies, No one laughs and no one cries; Where he is gone or how he fares No one knows and no one cares." At this time of day I suspect this epigram not to be quite original, but it served to give me for the nonce a high opinion of the pundit who read with me Cornelius Nepos and Caesar and some portions of that hopeless grammar, the Eton Greek, in the midst of his hard-breathing consumption of perpetual sandwiches and beer.
The first school chosen for me (though expensive, there could not have been a worse one) was a large mixed establishment for boys of all ages, from infancy to early manhood, belonging to one Rev.Dr.Morris of Egglesfield House, Brentford Butts, which I now judge to have been conducted solely with a view to the proprietor's pocket, without reference to the morals, happiness, or education of the pupils committed to his care.