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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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ridge I was set to earn , for I am sure my labours did not pay for the porridge , and the balance against me must have been enormous for beef and batter pudding , mutton and mince pies , tarts and trifle , which gladdened , and often grieved , my viscera . * I was bound apprentice
to an uncle to assist in putting his warehouse in disorder , with the hope of advancing to a desk in his counting-house ; the apex of my soaring in life , was that to be . Chain me in a counting-house ! Nail me to a desk ! Th © most wretched of God ' s creatures held an existence of undimmed Hiss compared with my life . Life ! place a frog on a mountain cliff , and he'll be as much in his element as I was . I was
a chamois in a rat-hole ; a bonita in a bucket ; an eagle in a cellar . I desired Mont Blanc for a breakfast-parlour , a sea for a washing basin ; a sky for ray drawing-room . I became a breathing cabbage stump , a talking turnip . Did I not struggle against this failing ? I did struggle . Day and night 1 struggled , in solitude , in my occupations , and in my holidays ; it was all struggle with me , and none knew that I struggled . Could no one see it ? no ? why , the marks
which I bear now , so deeply cut , were indelibly impressed on me before I was seventeen . There were hundreds who would vouch for my being forty , at least , when I was not twenty-six years of age . I might have passed as the grandfather of my own child at tbat age . What were these marks ? Ardour , scorching and shrivelling the
surface on which it was forbidden to blaze , the cicatrizing lacerations of wounded and insulted nature , the dry rents and fissures which were left by the streams of passion when they were violently thrown back from their course ; still they ran , they must run . They should have been permitted to flow in their channel : a finger touch would have calmed their impetuosity ; a breath would have smoothed their
roughness into bright and smiling ripples : but the effort was to dam them up . The consequence may be foreseen ; for the freshening verdure and beautiful flowers that would then have adorned the whole soil through which they rolled , we have the cataract and the marsh : the undermined banks crumbling in upon the waters , and engendering
pestilence . My father ' s would have been that finger , his would have been that breath , if I had spoken freely to him . The reflections which I have made since on his never forgotten lessons , show me that that was exactly the point at which he was aiming ; but others , with whom I was more frequently in contact , told me * they were sinful ,
» 1 _ . _ •_ * _• _ f O a . I . . a . t ¦* . !_ _ J ^ * . " & 1 they were injurious , &c . ; they were not ! they were good , beautiful , and just ! But was I , even then , without happiness ? No ; I communed with myself in the unfrequented green lanes , in the woods and coppices , by retired pools of water ; and often lost sight of all things which corroded my feelings : and my spirit floated buoyant and delighted
then . I have there laughed and sang , and talked with my nature aloud , and , unchecked by fear or doubt , the joyous tones of the bliss , for it was bliss , which was then and there kindled , rose from my heart , and leaped through the surrounding atmosphere with as much luxuriance of freedom as the skylark ' s song in aether . Yet I was compelled to go back to reality . A man teems much by accident . I discovered that I was certainly a man of superlative genius b y casting my eye over a peony publication called the Doctor ^ because I wai so subject to the ' belly-ache . '
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Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice . 337
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• No . 77 . 2 B
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1833, page 337, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/49/
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