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My uucle never * thrashed' me : though , according to rules , I deserved such punishment every day . But therein he happened % Q bf a philosopher of a different school . He seldom scolded me , though the provocations I gave him would have turned the voice , mellow as a flute ' s , into the teeth edging and ear grinding of a saw under the file . There was a sort of jesting in his mode of punishing me . He
once wrote on my little mahogany desk ( it was polished and glisten * ing , not long to continue so , when he first pointed to it as mine , ) i # the accumulated dust on its surface , the word 4 sloven , ' with the feather end of a quill . I understood that much better than I should have done thrashing and scolding . He often frowned at me , a $ darkly as his kind features could be twisted into a frown ; and the strings of his kinder heart drew all the muscles back into placidity
again . He was order embodied , method personified , neatness to a gram of dust upon a hair , regular as the sun —( not up so early )—businesslike as a clock ; what an anomaly of heart and habit was he ! and II have said what I was—what anomalies were he and I together ! An iceberg jostling against Etna ! He must have thought me an irredeemable soul , a worthless booby . He was a most kind , unostentatiously benevolent , and warmly-afFectioned man . But he was my
master , and had a right to expect , and to exact from me , a devotion to that which was really drawing my life-blood from my veins . True , true ! he did not see it . He could not know it , a sapling to him was a sapling , and whether a cinnamon or a fir , in the one soil and climate , it was to flourish at the owner ' s Ridding . Was he singular in this ? no ! the singularity , the eccentricity is in consulting nature ' s appropriateness , in cultivating humanity . * Educate each child to his
future station in life , ' that is , his rank , as it respects the size of the house in which he is to live , the clothes he may wear , and the money hemay be able to spend . Ha ha , ha , ha , ha ! such is the wisdom of education ! good , frightfully good ! and this is to be continued , though its consequences are a hundred withering- and breaking hearts added daily to the number which it has already broken . It is frightfully good ; whether educated in expectance or certainty of riches , or of
poverty , the consequences are the same : though , God knows ! there is a majority of victims of the former class . Oh , I have seen their writhings through all the veils of concealment . I writhed in sympathy which they could not see . I could and did sympathize , but had no power to balm . I had studied ma ? iy their only books had been ' the world . ' I have been the object of their pity and bounty , while my thankfulness towards them , my true gratitude was mingled witb yearnings of sorrow and compassion . *
The reader will be good enough to remember that I warned him before I set foot on this road of my life , that I should frequently pause to look at something by the way ; that I ehould stray out of th ? path and from the present bound to the future , to gaze back on the past ; that I should be discursive and digressive , but yet return to the spot from which I had abruptly broken and widely roamed . Sp do I now return to my uncle ' s counting-house , and 1 believe
hence-* In the course of my narrative I » hall offer some ' daring' opinions , and boldly state facts , in a £ eyf words on tjiis ' education * affair . To crush it , it mu * t bg uhowa to be ridiculous , absurd ) not « eriou *) y c < wate » te 4 .
Untitled Article
338 ^ 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 338, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2614/page/50/
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