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In such a school my disposition became rugged, but firm. The appetite for
admiration and small capacity for self-controul which I inherited from my
father, nursed by adversity, made me daring and reckless. I was rough as
the elements, and unlearned as the animals I tended. I often compared
myself to them, and finding that my chief superiority consisted in power, I
soon persuaded myself that it was in power only that I was inferior to the
chiefest potentates of the earth. Thus untaught in refined philosophy, and
pursued by a restless feeling of degradation from my true station in
society, I wandered among the hills of civilized England as uncouth a
savage as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome. I owned but one law, it was
that of the strongest, and my greatest deed of virtue was never to submit.
Yet let me a little retract from this sentence I have passed on myself. My
mother, when dying, had, in addition to her other half-forgotten and
misapplied lessons, committed, with solemn exhortation, her other child to
my fraternal guardianship; and this one duty I performed to the best of my
ability, with all the zeal and affection of which my nature was capable. My
sister was three years younger than myself; I had nursed her as an infant,
and when the difference of our sexes, by giving us various occupations, in
a great measure divided us, yet she continued to be the object of my
careful love. Orphans, in the fullest sense of the term, we were poorest
among the poor, and despised among the unhonoured. If my daring and courage
obtained for me a kind of respectful aversion, her youth and sex, since
they did not excite tenderness, by proving her to be weak, were the causes
of numberless mortifications to her; and her own disposition was not so
constituted as to diminish the evil effects of her lowly station.
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