After a good deal of anxious consideration, I have resolved to begin quite at the beginning. I have resolved, from a conscientious impulse which it were as difficult to describe as I find it to be impossible to resist,—to start, on these Reminiscences, with a tribute of affectionate respect to the memory of my Parents. And yet, I have not the slightest remembrance of them. They both died when I had scarcely attained my fourth year; but not without leaving behind those testimonies or memorials, of worth and excellence, mingled with too many evidences of misfortune and affliction, which render such memorials too permanently engraven on the mind of their offspring.

My father, Thomas Dibdin, was the TOM BOWLING of his younger brother, Charles Dibdin: a name, synonymous with all that is incomparable in the nautical ballad-poetry of our country. Charles Dibdin, my paternal uncle, made the Ocean the principal element of his muse. No poet before him had ever dwelt so much, and almost so exclusively, upon its characteristics and attributes. He peopled it with a set of human beings peculiarly his own. Whether its surface were rippled with the breeze, or its depths agitated by the storm, the sailor that was borne upon that surface was always the genuine Tar of Great Britain.