The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (Vol. 1&2). Lady Isabel Burton

      CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      THE EARLY DAYS OF RICHARD F. BURTON.

      By himself. Copied from his private Journals.

      "He travels and expatriates; as the bee

       From flower to flower, so he from land to land,

       The manners, customs, policy of all

       Pay contributions to the store he gleans;

       He seeks intelligence from every clime,

       And spreads the honey of his deep research

       At his return—a rich repast for me!"

      Genealogy and Family.

      Autobiographers generally begin too late.

      Elderly gentlemen of eminence sit down to compose memories, describe with fond minuteness babyhood, childhood, and boyhood, and drop the pen before reaching adolescence.

      Physiologists say that a man's body changes totally every seven years. However that may be, I am certain that the moral man does, and I cannot imagine anything more trying than for a man to meet himself as he was. Conceive his entering a room, and finding a collection of himself at the several decades. First the puking squalling baby one year old, then the pert unpleasant schoolboy of ten, the collegian of twenty who, like Lothair, "knows everything and has nothing to learn." The homme fait of thirty in the full warmth and heyday of life, the reasonable man of forty, who first recognizes his ignorance and knows his own mind, of fifty with white teeth turned dark, and dark hair turned white, whose experience is mostly disappointment with regrets for lost time and vanished opportunities. Sixty when the man begins to die and mourns for his past youth, at seventy when he ought to prepare for his long journey and never does. And at all these ages he is seven different beings not one of which he would wish to be again.

      Family History.

      First I would make one or two notes on family history.

      My grandfather was the Rev. Edward Burton, Rector of Tuam, in Galway (who with his brother, eventually Bishop Burton, of Killala, were the first of our branch to settle in Ireland). They were two of the Burtons of Barker Hill, near Shap, Westmoreland, who own a common ancestor with the Burtons of Yorkshire, of Carlow, and Northamptonshire. My grandfather married Maria Margaretta Campbell, daughter, by a Lejeune, of Dr. John Campbell, LL.D., Vicar-General of Tuam. Their son was my father, Lieut.-Colonel Joseph Netterville Burton, of the 36th Regiment, who married a Miss (Beckwith) Baker, of Nottinghamshire, a descendant, on her mother's side, of the Scotch Macgregors. The Lejeune above mentioned was related to the Montmorencys and Drelincourts, French Huguenots of the time of Louis XIV. To this hangs a story which will be told by-and-by. This Lejeune, whose real name was Louis Lejeune, is supposed to have been a son of Louis XIV. by the Huguenot Countess of Montmorency. He was secretly carried off to Ireland. His name was translated to Louis Young, and he eventually became a Doctor of Divinity. The royal, or rather morganatic, marriage contract was asserted to have existed, but has disappeared. The Lady Primrose of that date, who was a very remarkable personage, and a strong ally of the Jacobites, protected him and conveyed him to Ireland.

      The Burtons of Shap derive themselves from the Burtons of Longnor, like Lord Conyngham and Sir Charles Burton of Pollacton, and the two above named were the collateral descendants of Francis Pierpoint Burton, first Marquis of Conyngham, who gave up the name of Burton. The notable man of the family was Sir Edward Burton, a desperate Yorkist who was made a Knight Banneret by Edward IV. after the second battle of St. Albans, and who added to his arms the Cross and four roses.

      The Bishop of Killala's son was Admiral J. Ryder Burton, who entered the Navy in 1806. He served in the West Indies, and off the North Coast of Spain, when in an attack on the town of Castro, July, 1812, he received a gunshot wound in the left side, from which the ball was never