His Grace — page 14: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

8 HIS GRACE. and it seems almost necessary, for purposes of clear- ness, that I should start by being a little egotistical. I must just mention that my father had been a wealthy merchant who had failed in business late in life and had died shortly afterwards, leaving his widow and his two children with only a few hundreds a year where- with to engage upon the struggle for existence ; I must add that I, who had been originally intended for the Guards, was compelled by force of circumstances to accept Uncle John’s suggestions with gratitude; and I suppose I had better also confess without more ado that I had a certain facility for the composition of poetry. Nobody, I am sure, will be so unkind as to grudge me the privilege of calling my compositions poetry, because nobody who reads these lines is in the very least likely to have ever perused my poems. They have been published; but my publisher assures me— and I can well believe him—that they have at no time had a wide circulation. At that time, however, it did not seem to me an impossible thing that the public might eventually recognize some merit in my attempts at versification and even go so far as to pay me for the same ; so that, on my way from the City to St. James’s Street I asked myself quite seriously whether it was not my probable mission in life to bea poet in ahumble fashion. I have since discovered that my mission in life is essentially prosaic. One makes these discov- erles in the course of a year or two, and they are doubtless salutary, if they are not precisely agreeable. The first thing that I saw, after reaching my club and picking up one of the evening papers, was that the Duke of Hurstbourne was dead. The announce- ment interested me and served to divert my thoughts EOMmIchooks (Elo) m