William Lloyd Garrison | Page 6

at a stage of development, when boys are least

attractive, when they are disagreeably virile, full of their own
importance and the superiority of their sex. In the "Breach of the
Marriage Promise," by "An Old Bachelor," these signs of adolescence
are by no means wanting, they are, on the contrary, distinctly present
and palpable. But there were other signs besides these, signs that the
youth had had his eyes wide open to certain difficulties which beset the
matrimonial state and to the conventional steps which lead to it, and
that he had thought quite soberly, if not altogether wisely upon them.
The writer was verdant, to be sure, and self-conscious, and partial in his
view of the relations of the sexes, but there was withal a serious
purpose in the writing. He meant to expose and correct what he
conceived to be reprehensible conduct on the part of the gentler sex,
bad feminine manners. Just now he sees the man's side of the shield, a
few years later he will see the woman's side also. He ungallantly
concludes "to lead the 'single life,' and not," as he puts it, "trouble
myself about the ladies." A most sapient conclusion, considering that
this veteran misogynist was but sixteen years old. During the year
following the publication of this article, he plied his pen with no little
industry--producing in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such as
"South American Affairs," "State Politics," "A Glance at Europe," etc.,
all of which are interesting now chiefly as showing the range of his
growing intelligence, and as the earliest steps by which he acquired his
later mastery of the pen and powerful style of composition. In a letter
addressed to his mother about this time, the boy is full of Lloyd,
undisguisedly proud of Lloyd, believes in Lloyd. "When I peruse them
over" (_i.e._ those fifteen communications to the press), "I feel
absolutely astonished," he naïvely confesses, "at the different subjects
which I have discussed, and the style in which they are written. Indeed
it is altogether a matter of surprise that I have met with such signal
success, seeing I do not understand one single rule of grammar, and
having a very inferior education." The printer's lad was plainly not
lacking in the bump of approbativeness, or the quality of
self-assertiveness. The quick mother instinct of Fanny Garrison took
alarm at the tone of her boy's letter. Possibly there was something in
Lloyd's florid sentences, in his facility of expression, which reminded
her of Abijah. He, too, poor fellow, had had gifts in the use of the pen,
and what had he done, what had he come to? Had he not forsaken wife

and children by first forsaking the path of holiness? So she pricks the
boy's bubble, and points him to the one thing needful--God in the soul.
But in her closing words she betrays what we all along suspected, her
own secret pleasure in her son's success, when she asks, "Will you be
so kind as to bring on your pieces that you have written for me to see?"
Ah! was she not every inch a mother, and how Lloyd did love her. But
she was no longer what she had been. And no wonder, for few women
have been called to endure such heavy burdens, fight so hopelessly the
battle for bread, all the while her heart was breaking with grief. Disease
had made terrible inroads upon her once strong and beautiful person.
Not the shadow of the strength and beauty of her young womanhood
remained. She was far away from her early home and friends, far away
from her darling boy, in Baltimore. James, her pride, was at sea,
Elizabeth, a sweet little maiden of twelve, had left her to take that last
voyage beyond another sea, and Abijah, without one word of farewell,
with the silence of long years unbroken, he, too, also! had hoisted sail
and was gone forever. And now in her loneliness and sorrow, knowing
that she, too, must shortly follow, a great yearning rose up in her poor
wounded heart to see once more her child, the comfort and stay of her
bitter life. And as she had written to him her wish and longing, the boy
went to her, saw the striking change, saw that the broken spirit of the
saintly woman was day by day nearing the margin of the dark hereafter,
into whose healing waters it would bathe and be whole again. The
unspeakable experience of mother and son, during this last meeting is
not for you and me, reader, to look into. Soon after Lloyd's return to
Newburyport a cancerous tumor developed on her shoulder, from the
effects of which she died September 3, 1823, at the age of forty-five.
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