For scarcely entering on my prime of age,
Grief marked me for her own.
[_Camoens, by Lord Strangford_.
My education had been superintended exclusively by my mother. Under
her intelligent control I had mastered the common rudiments of
learning, and had acquired, from my intellectual association with her,
a taste for poetry and light philosophy. I read every thing with an
earnestness which knew no satiety. In my fifteenth year, my mind was a
rude mass of incongruous erudition; possessing learning without
accuracy, and information without wisdom. My character derived a
rudeness from the unbroken solitude of my studies, taking, like the
insect of the forest, the hue of the leaf on which it lived and
banqueted. The "Book of Martyrs," awakened into melancholy the
sympathies of my heart, and lashed into bitterness the fierce
intolerance of my passions. I was religious only in the vengeance of
persecution! How often have I felt, beneath the prayers of my mother,
the gentleness of a hallowed contrition stealing over my proud heart.
Alas! that this contagious sympathy should leave no impression; for I
would return to my favorite feast of blood, and arise from its
enjoyment a tyrant and a bigot.
The day on which I was sent to school, is deeply marked on my memory.
The preparations for my departure, the advice of my mother, the
remonstrances of my nurse, and the tears of Scipio, were the gloomy
heralds of my utter desolation of heart. Our slaves, as I passed them
in the chariot, left their work and ran to bless me. Many of them bade
me farewell with struggling emotion, while several of the old ones
told me to be of stout heart, and never forget that I was a Granby. I
sobbed aloud in the fulness of my heart, when I gave them my hand. The
sternness of manhood has never blushed for those tears.
My teacher was a native of Scotland, and officiated as the minister to
the parish in which he resided. Like most scholars, he could turn to
the example of Socrates for resignation under the rule of the
shrillest of all Xantippes. It was the principal weapon he used in his
marital patience, but with that success which always made him doubt
his own victory. He was a curious compound of pedantry, simplicity,
and erudition. His existence was a verb, and his whole life was a dull
routine of plain theology and pompous verbosity. He was under many
ties of gratitude to our family, and my arrival was greeted by him
with demonstrations of pleasure and affection.
I was now almost alone in the world. The silken luxury, the
aristocratic pride, and the unsubdued temper in which I had been bred,
utterly disqualified me for the democracy in which I was placed. In
the solitude of my pride I turned to the resources of study, and by a
severity of character I chilled into cold contempt the incipient
friendship of many a noble and ingenuous heart. I made but one friend,
and to him I clung with affectionate enthusiasm. To Arthur Ludwell I
disclosed the secret feelings and desires of my nature. He could
reprove me without inflicting pain, and excite me to labor without
flattery. His heart was the chosen citadel of every virtue under
heaven, and he was wont to bear the whirlwind of my passions without a
murmur of resentment. On one occasion I had treated him with excessive
rudeness. He bore my pride with his accustomed fortitude; and that
night, after I had retired to bed, he entered my room, and thinking me
asleep, he bent over my face and wept like a child. Could I ask a
keener reproach? Could I demand a better proof of the purity and
delicacy of his affection?
In this school there was a student named Pilton, the only son of one
who had been many years before my birth, an overseer on the plantation
of my father, and who had amassed, by economy and industry, a large
fortune. He was a rude, vulgar, and unfeeling boy, with a harsh
countenance and coarsely built frame. His hair was a dingy red, and
his frame uncouth and repulsive; yet he possessed a genius which could
grasp every difficulty, and an intellect which could master the
asperities of every science. I hated him with a vindictive and
uncompromising energy. I did not envy him, for I could not so far
disgrace the dignity of that passion (the cousin-german of school-boy
emulation) as to extend its malevolence to such a being. My feelings
towards him, were disgust and unalterable contempt. He was frank
without liberality, and candid without honor. Deceit flung its patched
mantle over the chronic vice of his character, and duplicity ruled a
heart in which nature had thrown neither fire, delicacy, nor
elevation. From the influence of his mind he had attached to himself a
considerable party of the timid, irresolute, and indolent; yet he
shrunk from the merciless venom of my scorn. Though a coward he could
display the courage of necessity, and would sometimes retort my
sarcasms with severity and firmness. Shortly before our separation, we
had quarrelled with implacable fierceness. I called him a coward, and
an ill-bred vagrant. He replied to my attack in these words, which
ever in after-life, writhed around my memory in a cold and
scorpion-like embrace:
"Mr. Granby! I know the history of your proud family. You are
seventeen years of age. Do you not dread the mystery of that number,
which made your grandfather a premature dotard? Beware! I am revenged.
You will live a lunatic and die a driveller."
I was silent under this fearful curse. The narrative of my
grandfather's precocious youth and imbecile adolescence, his lofty
chivalry and stubborn pride, which I had often drank from the
garrulity of my nurse, was borne before me in a full and freshening
tide. I controlled my struggling passions, and quitted my adversary
humbled more by the agony of my own feelings, than excited by the
bitterness of his retort. This scene constituted an era in the history
of my hate. Revenge hourly lashed itself into frenzy; and amid the
bustle of the day and the solitude of the night, I never ceased from
the pursuit of an opportunity to gratify the deeply seated passion of
my heart. I never forgave him! I banqueted on that merciless revenge,
which dripping in a steady and uniform course through the recesses of
my heart, formed a cold and impenetrable stalactite of withering
malignity. It was a treasured, honored, and hoarded hate which planted
itself firmly in my bosom, and which eagerly longed for its time of
fruition. Even now, when time has worn down the fierceness of my life
and softened into resignation the frown of destiny, this passion
blooms on, with more freshness and constancy than the mistletoe which
scatters its wild luxuriance around the blasted and ruined oak.
The period now approached when I was to quit school. I had never
returned home, but the pains of absence had been alleviated by the
monthly visits of Scipio, always laden with letters of reproof from my
mother, love from Lucy, ambition from my brother, and scraps of Horace
and quaint gallantries from my uncle. I had learned rapidly and
accurately, mastering the spirit and elegance of the Latin language,
and acquiring that measure of Greek literature which enables the
Virginian scholar to play the pedant on it for one year, and
authorises him to forget it in two.
Arthur Ludwell had promised to accompany me home; and in a short time
the Chalgrave chariot, with its massy doors, conceited driver, tangled
harness and gazing postilion, brought the glad tidings of my return to
the home of my fathers. I quitted school without regret, for there I
had spent some of the most miserable hours of my existence. With how
much delusive philosophy do we dwell on the vapid pleasures of our
schoolboy days! and when tired of the poor farce of cheating ourselves
into a little happiness, we labor to coax ourselves into tenderness by
invoking the remembrance of some shadowy and negative dream. Our
cares, vexations and disappointments, as men, make us envy the
apparent tranquillity of the boy, while we forget that youth, though a
smaller circumference of mortality, has yet the same centre of
passion, hope and disappointment. In the spring-time of life we are
full of elastic anticipation; and over the brilliant horizon which it
creates, each cloud drifts rapidly by and none sojourns to darken the
brilliant outline. We fondly believe that all beyond is a candid and
generous world, eager to applaud our genius or reciprocate our
sympathies. How soon is this gossamer fabric crushed beneath the
rugged grasp of reality, and how truly do we find that anticipation is
folly, and retrospection an utter foolishness of heart.
On a laughing morning in spring I quitted school for home, with all my
buoyant feelings of filial and fraternal love chastised into
wretchedness by the curse of Pilton.
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