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Untitled Article
ably . It was just that he and they should think so , for I had concealed the real cause of non-payment . I have quitted gay and festive scenes in this metropolis , and walked the streets all night in my dinner dress ; I had not sixpence to procure shelter ; for access to my own it was too late . I was compelled to accept the invitation , because I dared not shock a friend by the truth ; a false excuse I trembled under ; I
am improved in this latterly , and could tell a lie unblushingly , but occasion never comes , thank heaven ! I have been sneered at as a very silly fellow , by persons whose intellects w ere , really I speak it without spleen or vexation , too diminutive , too despicable for contempt , and I felt just as angry as the ocean would be , were they to spit in it . I would not touch them , for they had no armour , or they might have found more pleasant amusement in putting their fingers into a scorpion ' s
nestmore rest by laying their heads on a coiled rattle-snake , than in my retaliation . I have been piteously smiled at , and I remain unseen , by the clever and richly mental , whose notice and approbation I have laboured so hard , and endured so much to win , from the mere fact of their lending credence to the reports of these blockheads respecting me . There is , unfortunately for me and for thousands of others , a proneness , even in the wisest , to hear fault-finding , as discriminating
truth . In me there are abundance of mental weeds , and in all I may write or say ; but many of those things would be called flowers , if they were not looked at through other people ' s spectacles , which are now regarded as weeds . Through all the moral mountains and gulfs of my existence , these vicissitudes of happiness and sorrow , these laudations and ridicule , I am sure I never designed injury , or
meditated ill will to human being ; I loved the whole family of nature . Verjuice was a lucus non lucendo—the name was a libel on my moral and physical constitution ; every throb of my heart threw it back as a lie . I looked upon these changes of my native place , and from crown to heel became Verjuice ! Mark , if I contradict this , as I travel along .
Of these thirty-three years of my life , or , rather , that greater part o f them which was spent in roaming in foreign lands' To read mankind—not laws , but hearts * I have at length gathered resolution to speak—say I have been driven to it . But the beginning of rny life is not yet ended . I have a dim and shadowy recollection of things which must have made their mark on my memory , ere I was two years of age . My christening is not among them , though there is a faint impression of cold water dropping
on my face , and my hand petulantly rubbing it off . This is not strange , for the affair was likely to be delayed between the yes and no of my parents ; and my mother had it . The name was my father ' s choice , at all events , and he had prescience in calling me Peregrine : it was forethought in him , that however I might contradict my patronymic , my ' sponsorial appellation' should * denote me truly . ' With my mother its diminutive was 4 Ferry '—my father ' s was shorter , and stouter— fc Pel / and as he outlived her by some fifteen years , Pel con ^ tinued to be my note of call : for no one was so tender towards me as to adopt that whicbjny mother had used . By what means we clambefed over the hiii ^ And crags fro m my native place , I have no reiuem-
Untitled Article
33 £ Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 332, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/44/
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