ld make its way even into ears that were past
hearing:

"----mea saeva querela
Auribus insidet ceratis, auribus etsi
Non audituris hyberna nocte procellam."

The power, however, which inflated my verse, soon collapsed; having been
soothed from the very first by finding--that except in this one instance
at the dinner-table, which probably had been viewed as an indecorum, no
further restraint of any kind whatever was meditated upon my intercourse
with M. Besides, it was too painful to lock up good verses in one's own
solitary breast. Yet how could I shock the sweet filial heart of my
cousin by a fierce lampoon or _stylites_ against her father, had Latin
even figured amongst her accomplishments? Then it occurred to me that
the verses might be shown to the father. But was there not something
treacherous in gaining a man's approbation under a mask to a satire upon
himself? Or would he have always understood me? For one person a year
after took the _sacrae mensae_ (by which I had meant the sanctities of
hospitality) to mean the sacramental table. And on consideration I began
to suspect, that many people would pronounce myself the party who had
violated the holy ties of hospitality, which are equally binding on
guest as on host. Indolence, which sometimes comes in aid of good
impulses as well as bad, favoured these relenting thoughts; the society
of M. did still more to wean me from further efforts of satire: and,
finally, my Latin poem remained a _torso_. But upon the whole my
guardian had a narrow escape of descending to posterity in a
disadvantageous light, had he rolled down to it through my hexameters.

Here was a case of merely playful feud. But the same talent of Latin
verses soon after connected me with a real feud that harassed my mind
more than would be supposed, and precisely by this agency, viz. that it
arrayed one set of feelings against another. It divided my mind as by
domestic feud against itself. About a year after, returning from the
visit to my guardian's, and when I must have been nearly completing my
twelfth year, I was sent to a great public school. Every man has reason
to rejoice who enjoys so great an advantage. I condemned and _do_
condemn the practice of sometimes sending out into such stormy exposures
those who are as yet too young, too dependent on female gentleness, and
endowed with sensibilities too exquisite. But at nine or ten the
masculine energies of the character are begi