Socrates and
Plato, Cicero and Seneca, Cudworth and Butler, could not have been more
austerely moral than were we little rogues, as we relieved the immense
exertion involved in completing a single short baby-like sentence, by
shying at one companion a rule, or hurling at another a paper pellet
intended to light plump on his forehead or nose. Our custom was to begin
every composition with the proposition that such or such a virtue "was
one of the greatest blessings we enjoy"; and this triumph of accurate
statement was not discovered by our teacher to be purely mechanical,
until one juvenile thinker, having avarice to deal with, declared it to
be "one of the greatest evils we enjoy." The whole thing was such a
piece of monstrous hypocrisy, that I once timidly suggested to the
schoolmaster that it would be well to allow me to select my own subject.
The request was granted; and, as narrative is the natural form of
composition which a boy adopts when he has his own way, I filled, in
less than half the time heretofore consumed in writing a quarter of a
page, four pages of letter-paper with an account of my being in a ship
taken by a pirate; of the heroic defiance I launched at the pirate
captain; and the sagacity I evinced in escaping the fate of my
fellow-passengers, in not being ordered to "walk the plank." The story,
though trashy enough, was so much better than any of the moral essays of
the other pupils, that the teacher commanded me to read it before the
whole school, as an evidence of the rapid strides I had made in the art
of "composition.
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