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Untitled Article
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Untitled Article
sport . The sport is paid for , it is a purchased right . But , by your hope of an invitation to the next ball or dinner , do not let the patron or patroness see you sneer . I visit the theatre : when the machinery is awkwardly moved , or an actor is at fault , there will be a hiss or a laugh of jeering . I am so silly that I can neither laugh nor hiss . I feel the distress of the actor , or the dilemma of the scene shifter ; for I know they are distressed , that they are suffering acutely ; but this
is morbid sensitiveness . 4 But , ' says the conventional reader , ' this callousness , this indifference to the feelings of others , Mr . Pel . Verjuice , prevails only among the lower orders . ' I will not dispute that , sir ; first settle which are the lower orders ; in those whose education has cost most money , I have marked the induration fifty times as frequently as I have seen it in others ; and it showed itself without any desire on my part to find it . Mark me , sir ; I limit my declaration to my observation of
congregated masses . I speak another truth as freely ; it is among such , individually , that I , individually , have had my feelings most carefully and benignly consulted . There are different teachers of the same rules , as far as regards the words thereof , and they produce opposite results . This , too , I can avouch from experience . Memory impregnates reflection , and gives birth to a thousand thoughts , as I look back on my boyhood and compare my then state of feeling with the experience of a life of constant struggle and
opposing vicissitude . I was poor , I was humbly cast , 1 was struck with poverty ' s stamp ; and I was dealt with as if my only possible means of respiring through life , if I would escape the pangs of
absolute want , were to be found in a severe attention , a changeless application to the records of a day-book and ledger , invoices and half-yearly accounts , despatching of wares and examinations of parcels ; dexterity and industry , method and correctness , in these affairs were to limit my endeavours , and be the sum of all my mind ' s and body ' s attainments . I was shown that all wisdom was comprised in these . I wag taught that nothing was so sure an induction
to virtuous and respectable life , so certain of a certificate of talent and good character , as skill in drawing up an account without any erasure , and arriving at a sum total without an error . The genius which invented numbers and letters was nobody ; and he that would reap pecuniary profit from their use , was an angel of light . There was coming on me , spite of my elasticity and buoyancy of imagination , a
dryness of heart ; it was all duty and no love , all obedience and no affection , which was to drag me on through boyhood and youth up to manhood ; and a pretty thing 1 should have been if I could have lived up to manhood through such a dead , uphill tugging of the body , against the repugnant and recoiling mind . I should have been an ass in a mill-wheel , and like him worn into blindness by keeping my eyes on the same flitting spot ; yet I had advantages which are seldom mingled in the lot of one so humbly cast . There was a weekly reaction when 1 conversed with my father ; he was a thinking man , though subdued out of himself by dependence ; he possessed a mind which soared more widely , and swayed more influentially than is permitted or believed to exist in men of his rank ; and his brother , my master , had a reverence for his superior understanding and penetra-
Untitled Article
896 Autobiography of Pel . Verjuice . *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1833, page 396, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2616/page/36/
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