Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 098.djvu/224

212 he is known, to his familiars, it went far towards the making of him.

A wonderful digression, by the way; but one for which the "Wonder-Book" is radically responsible, and into which we should not have been ensnared, but that the Goody-books, and encyclopædic horn-books, and pantechnic primers, have still their advocates in the midst of us. Well:

And therefore grateful and glad is our welcome of one who revivifies dormant feelings, and freshens sere hearts with the dew of the morning, and to whom we can say,, with full assurance of faith, "Historian of our infancy! bide with us—do not yet depart—dead times revive in thee:"—

born one morning in August. Scarcely, however, was I brought into the world, when, contrary to all the usual ways of parents, mine sent me out into it to make my way as well as I could. My birth had something classical in it, as, like Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, I leaped full-grown from the brain of my parent. Like Minerva, too, I had no mother. The next step of my life was less godlike, for I was committed to the pocket of a servant. My father gave me one look of kindness, as if I had something about or in me which pleased him—as if he had done a good action in producing me, so beaming with benevolence was his eye—and then gave directions that I was to be sent off immediately.

Thus, in pure kindness, was I banished the paternal mansion. I was hurried to a strange house in a narrow street, and thrust into a hole in the wall. Here I found many companions. Some had a well-born and an educated appearance, while others had a dirty, low-bred air, and were most offensive to me, coming, as I had, fresh from a perfumed chamber. One vulgar fellow—a thick, shapeless mass, full of everything odious, like a rotten water-melon—tumbled plump in on me, giving me a mark in my face I shall never lose; and when I uttered a slight expression of sensation—for I have much sensibility—he burst into such invectives