yment. A poor friendless lad of genius,
diluting his thin consumptive blood on bad potatoes and water, and, at
the same time, anticipating the labours of our antiquarian societies by
his elaborate and truthful drawings of an interesting class of national
antiquities, must be regarded as a melancholy object of contemplation;
but such hapless geniuses there are in every age in which art is
cultivated, and literature has its admirers; and, shrinkingly modest and
retiring in their natures, the world rarely finds them out in time.

I found employment enough for my leisure during this winter in my books
and walks, and in my uncle James's workshop, which, now that Uncle James
had no longer to lecture me about my Latin, and my carelessness as a
scholar in general, was a very pleasant place, where a great deal of
sound remark and excellent information were always to be had. There was
another dwelling in the neighbourhood in which I sometimes spent a not
unpleasant hour. It was a damp underground room, inhabited by a poor old
woman, who had come to the town from a country parish in the previous
year, bringing with her a miserably deformed lad, her son, who, though
now turned of twenty, more resembled, save in his head and face, a boy
of ten, and who was so helpless a cripple, that he could not move from
off his seat. "Poor lame Danie," as he was termed, was, notwithstanding
the hard measure dealt him by nature, an even-tempered,
kindly-dispositioned lad, and was, in consequence, a great favourite
with the young people in the neighbourhood, especially with the humbly
taught young women, who--regarding him simply as an intelligence,
coupled with sympathies, that could write letters--used to find him
employment, which he liked not a little, as a sort of amanuensis and
adviser-general in their affairs of the heart. Richardson tells that he
learned to write his Pamela by the practice he acquired in writing
love-letters, when a very young lad, for half a score love-sick females,
who trusted and employed him. "Poor Danie," though he bore on a skeleton
body, wholly unfurnished with muscle, a brain of the average size and
activity, was not born to be a novelist; but he had the necessary
materials in abundance; and though secret enough to all his other
acquaintance, I, who cared not a great deal about the matter, might, I
found, have as many of his experiences as I pleased. I enjoyed among my
companions the reputation of being what they ter