IT is a hard and nice subject for a man to write of himself; it grates
his own heart to say anything of disparagement and the reader’s ears to
hear anything of praise for him. There is no danger from me of offending
him in this kind; neither my mind, nor my body, nor my fortune allow me
any materials for that vanity. It is sufficient for my own contentment
that they have preserved me from being scandalous, or remarkable on the
defective side. But besides that, I shall here speak of myself only in
relation to the subject of these precedent discourses, and shall be
likelier thereby to fall into the contempt than rise up to the estimation
of most people. As far as my memory can return back into my past life,
before I knew or was capable of guessing what the world, or glories, or
business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a secret
bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn away from
others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and inscrutable to
man’s understanding. Even when I was a very young boy at school, instead
of running about on holidays and playing with my fellows, I was wont to
steal from them and walk into the fields, either alone with a book, or
with some one companion, if I could find any of the same temper. I was
then, too, so much an enemy to all constraint, that my masters could
never prevail on me, by any persuasions or encouragements, to learn
without book the common rules of grammar, in which they dispensed with me
alone, because they found I made a shift to do the usual exercises out of
my own reading and observation. That I was then of the same mind as I am
now (which I confess I wonder at myself) may appear by the latter end of
an ode which I made when I was but thirteen years old, and which was then
printed with many other verses. The beginning of it is boyish, but of
this part which I here set down, if a very little were corrected, I
should hardly now be much ashamed.