med me beyond measure, because it pledged me in a manner
with the hearer to support this first attempt by a second, by a third,
by a fourth--Oh, heavens! there is no saying how far the horrid man
might go in his unreasonable demands upon me. I groaned under the weight
of his expectations; and, if I laid but the first round of such a
staircase, why, then, I saw in vision a vast Jacob's ladder towering
upward to the clouds, mile after mile, league after league; the
consequence of which would be, that I should be expected to run up and
down this ladder, like any fatigue party of Irish hodmen, carrying hods
of mortar and bricks to the top of any Babel which my wretched admirer
might choose to build. But I put a stop to this villainy. I nipped the
abominable system of extortion in the very bud, by refusing to take the
first step. The man could have no pretense, you know, for expecting me
to climb the third or fourth round, when I had seemed quite unequal to
the first. Professing the most absolute bankruptcy from the very
beginning, giving the man no sort of hope that I would pay even one
farthing in the pound, I never could be made miserable, or kept in hot
water, by unknown responsibilities, or by endless anxieties about some
bill being presented, which the monster might pretend for one moment
that I had indorsed, or in some way had sanctioned his expecting that I
would pay.

Still, with all this passion for being despised, which was so essential
to my peace of mind, I found at times an altitude--a starry altitude--in
the station of contempt for me assumed by my brother that nettled me.
Sometimes, indeed, the mere necessities of dispute carried me, before I
was aware of my own imprudence, so far up the stair-case of Babel, that
my brother was shaken for a moment in the infinity of his contempt: and,
before long, when my superiority in some bookish accomplishments
displayed itself, by results that could not be entirely dissembled,
mere foolish human nature forced me on rare occasions into some trifle
of exultation at these retributory triumphs. But more often I was
disposed to grieve over them. They tended to shake that solid foundation
of utter despicableness upon which I relied so much for my freedom from
anxiety; and, therefore, upon the whole, it was satisfactory to my mind
that my brother's opinion of me, after any little transient oscillation,
gravitated determinately back toward that settled contempt which had
been th