Stories of Achievement, Volume IV | Page 7

give my manners a brush, I went to a
country dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy
against these meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I
repent, in opposition to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was
subject to strong passions; from that instance of disobedience in me he
took a sort of dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the
dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation,
comparatively with the strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of
Presbyterian country life; for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of
thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early
ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterward within
the line of innocence. The great misfortune of my life was to want an
aim. I had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind
gropings of Homer's Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my
father's situation entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two
openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of
niggardly economy or the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The
first is so contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it;
the last I always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance!
Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for
sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation
and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made
me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my reputation for
bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a strength of
thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not
seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited,
or any great wonder that always, where two or three met together, there
was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of my heart was a
leaning toward the adorable half of humankind. My heart was
completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or

other; and, as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was
various; sometimes I was received with favour, and sometimes I was
mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook I feared
no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never
cared further for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I spent
the evenings in the way after my own heart.
Another circumstance in my life which made some alteration in my
mind and manners was that I spent my nineteenth summer on a
smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn
mensuration, surveying, dialling, etc., in which I made a pretty good
progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind.
The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes
happened to me to fall with those who carried it on. Scenes of
swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were, till this time, new to me;
but I was no enemy to social life.
My reading meantime was enlarged with the very important addition of
Thomson's and Shenstone's Works. I had seen human nature in a new
phase; and I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary
correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met
with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and pored
over them most devoutly. I kept copies of any of my own letters that
pleased me, and a comparison between them and the composition of
most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so
far that, though I had not three farthings' worth of business in the world,
yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a
broad plodding son of the day-book and ledger.
My life flowed on much in the same course till my twenty-third year.
The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure:
Sterne and Mackenzie--"Tristram Shandy" and the "Man of
Feeling"--were my bosom favourites. Poesy was still a darling walk for
my mind, but it was only indulged in according to the humour of the
hour. I had usually half a dozen or more pieces on hand; I took up one
or other, as it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the
work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, when once lighted up,

raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the
conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet! None of the
rhymes of those days are in print, except "Winter, a Dirge," the