Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 1.djvu/256

 dressed "To a little Girl whom I had offended,"—a production not remarkable solely on account of the future celebrity of its author, but because it displays at once his mildness of temper and lively fancy. The argument that shrewishness spoils a young lady's looks, and ought therefore to be avoided, coming as it does from a little fellow of twelve to a girl about his own age, is adroitly managed:

Thus early did Blacklock show, that in the course of reading chosen for him, his father had not mistaken the bent of his inclination. But though, as we have mentioned, some of his comrades delighted to forward his favourite studies, and, by their assiduous attentions, to make him forget the deprivation under which he laboured, there were others who took pleasure in rendering him bitterly conscious of his misfortune, and exulted in the success of such practical jokes, as it was easy to make him the subject of. It is but too obvious that his own experience at this period, when exposed to the insults of unfeeling boys, suggested the reflection introduced in the article "Blind," afterwards written by him for the Encyclopaedia Britannica: "Parents of middle or of higher rank," he there remarks, "who are so unfortunate as to have blind children, ought by all possible means to keep them out of vulgar company. The herd of mankind have a wanton malignity which eternally impels them to impose upon the blind, and to enjoy the painful situations in which these impositions place them. This is a stricture upon the humanity of our species, which nothing but the love of truth and the dictates of benevolence could have extorted from us. But we have have known some," he adds, evidently referring to himself, "who have suffered so much from this diabolical mirth in their own persons, that it is natural for us, by all the means in our power, to prevent others from becoming its victims." The very means taken to alleviate Blacklock's misfortune in some sort increased its force; for as his mind expanded, it taught him to feel with greater keenness his own dependent condition: familiar with some of the noblest flights of genius, and himself become a poet, he would probably have exchanged all his intellectual stores for the ability of earning his bread by handicraft labour. Lamenting his blindness, he thus closes an enumeration of the miseries it entailed upon him:

Alternately depressed by a sense of his own helplessness, and comforted by that piety with which he seems to have been from first to last most deeply imbued, Blacklock lived at home till his nineteenth year. A fresh misfortune then overtook him in the loss of his father, who was crushed to death by the fall of a malt-kiln, with eighty bushels of grain upon it, belonging to his son-in-law. Blacklock's affection for his parents must have exceeded that of other children; for that anxious solicitude about his safety and comfort which other boys begin