Autobiographic Sketches

ener, besides laborers equal to at least two more, were required for the grounds and gardens. And no motive existed any longer for being near to a great trading town, so long a

it, and it proceeded. Originally the house and grounds had cost about ￡6000. I have heard that only one offer was made, viz., of ￡2500. Be that as it may, for the sum of ￡2500 it was sold; and I have been often assured that, by waiting a few years, four to six times that sum might have been obtained with ease. This is not improbable, as the house was then out in the country; but since then the town of Manchester has gathered round it and enveloped it. Meantime, my guardians were all men of honor and integrity; but their hands were fil

a new footing, plainly guarded by a few obvious provisions. As under the Roman laws, for a long period, the guardian should be made responsible in law, and should give security from the first for the due performance of his duties. But, to give him a motive for doing this, of course he must be paid. With

, at first, grew nothing but a sunshine of approbation delightful to my heart. Within six weeks all this had changed. The approbation indeed continued, and the public expression of it. Neither would there, in the ordinary course, have been any painful reaction from jealousy, or fretful resistance, to the soundness of my pretensions; since it was sufficiently known to such of my school-fellows as stood on my own level in the school, that I, who had no male relatives but military men, and those in India, could not have benefited by any clandestine aid. But, unhappily, Dr. Morgan was at that time dissatisfied with some points in the progress of his head class; [2] and, as it soon appeared, was continually throwing in their teeth the brilliancy of my verses at eleven or twelve, by comparison with theirs at seventeen, eighteen, and even nineteen. I had observed him sometimes pointing to myself, and was perplexed at seeing this gesture followed by gloomy looks, and what French reporters call "sensation," in these young men, whom naturally I viewed with awe as my leaders-boys that were called young men, men that were reading Sophocles, (a name that carried with it the sound of something seraphic to my ears,) and who had never vouchsafed to waste a word on such a child as myself. The day was come, however, when all that would be changed. One of these leaders strode up to me in the public playground, and, delivering a blow on my shoulder, which was not intended to hurt me, but as a mere formula of introduction, asked me "what the devil I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying other people in that manner. Were 'other people' to have no rest for me and my verses, which, after all, were horribly bad?" There might have been some difficulty in returning an answer to this address, but none was required. I was briefly admonished to see that I wrote worse for the future, or else--. At this aposiopesis I looked inquiringly at the speaker, and he filled up the chasm by saying that he would "annihilate" me. Could any person fail to be aghast at such a demand? I was to write worse than my own standard, which, by his account of my verses, must be difficult; and I was to write worse than himself, which might be impossible. My feelings revolted against so arrogant a demand, unless it had been far otherwise expressed; if death on the spot had awaited me, I could not have controlled myself; and on the next occasion for sending up verses to the head master, so far from attending to the orders issued, I double-shotted my guns; double applause descended on myself; but I remarked with some awe, though not repenting of what I had done, that double confusion seemed to agitate the ranks of my enemies. Amongst them loomed out in the distance my "annihilating" friend, who shook his huge fist at me,

, or some such game, Sir Sidney was surprised to observe that the ball thrown back was not the same. Fortunately, he had the presence of mind to dissemble his sudden surprise. He retired, examined the ball, found it stuffed with letters; and, in the same way, he subsequently conducted a long correspondence, and arranged the whole circumstances of his escape; which

nt, at that moment Sir Sidney had no acquaintances in Bath, [4] a fact which is not at all to be wondered at. Living so much abroad and at sea, an English sailor, of whatever rank, has few opportunities for making friends at home. And yet there was a necessity that Sir Sidney should gratify the public interest, so warmly expressed, by presenting himself somewhere or other to the public eye. But how trying a service to the most practised and otherwise most callous veteran on such an occasion, that he should step forward, saying in effect, "So you are wanting to see me: well, then, here I am: come and look at me!" Put it into what language you please, such a summons was written on all faces, and countersigned by his worship the mayor, who began to whisper insinuations of riots if Sir Sidney did not comply. Yet, if he did, inevitably his own act of obedience to the public pleasure took the shape of an ostentatious self-parading under the construction of those numerous persons who knew nothing of the public importunity, or of Sir Sidney's unaffected and even morbid reluctance to obtrude himself upon the public eye. The thing was unavoidable; and the sole palliation that it admitted was-to break the concentration of the public gaze, by associating Sir Sidney with some alien group, no matter of what cattle. Such a group would relieve both parties-gazer and gazee-from too distressing a consciousness of the little business on which they had met. We, the schoolboys, being three, intercepted and absorbed part of the enemy's fire, and, by furnishing Sir Sidney with real bona fide matter of conversation, we released him from the most distressing part of his sufferings, viz., the passive and silent acquiescence in his own apotheosis-holding a lighted candle, as it were, to the glorification of his own shrine. With our help, he weathered the storm of homage silently ascending. And we, in fact, whilst seeming to ourselves too undeniably a triad of bores, turned out the most serviceable allies that Sir Sidney ever had by land or sea, until several moons later, when he formed the invaluable acquaintance of the Syrian "butcher," viz., Djezzar, the Pacha of Acre. I record this little trait of Sir Sidney's constitutional temperament, and the little service through which I and my two comrades contributed materially to his relief, as an illustration of that infirmity which besieges the nervous system of our nation. It is a sensitiveness which sometimes amounts to lunacy, and sometimes even tempts to

me, why and how it came about, that in every distribution of honors Sir Sidney Smith was overlooked. In the Mediterranean he made many enemies, especially amongst those of his own profession, who used to speak of him as far too fine a gentleman, and above his calling. Certain it is that he liked better to be doing business on shor

ion, the whole of the "Orlando Furioso;" meaning by the whole the entire twenty-four books into which Hoole had condensed the original forty-six of Ariosto; and, from my own experience at that time, I am disposed to think that the homeliness of this version is an advantage, from not calling off the attention at all from the narration to the narrator. At this time also I first read the "Paradise Lost;" but, oddly enough, in the edition of Bentley, that great paradiorthotaes, (or pseudo-restorer of the text.) At the close of my illness, the head master called upon my mother, in company with his so

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ted by such schools, they obtain a plausible pretext for representing all beyond grammar as something extraneous and casual that did not enter into the original or normal conception of the founders, and that may therefore have been due to alien suggestion. But now, when Suetonius writes a little book, bearing this title, "De Illustribus Grammaticis," what does he mean? What is it that he promises? A memoir upon the eminent grammarians of Rome? Not at all, but a memoir upon the distinguished literati of Rome. Grammatica does certainly mean sometimes grammar; but it is also the best Latin word for literature. A grammaticus is what the Fre

t how to make one's self intelligibl

two last were the regular fireeaters of the day. Sir Horatio Nelson being already an admiral, was no longer looked to for insulated exploits of brill

n; Sir Sidney's mother and Lady Camelford being si