lone.
To complain of a father is, to a delicate mind, a delicate matter, and
Sir Purcell was a gentleman to all about him. His chief affliction in
his youth, therefore, kept him dumb. A gentleman to all about him, he
unhappily forgot what was due to his own nature. Must we not speak under
pressure of a grief? Little people should know that they must: but then
the primary task is to teach them that they are little people. For,
if they repress the outcry of a constant irritation, and the complaint
against injustice, they lock up a feeding devil in their hearts, and
they must have vast strength to crush him there. Strength they must have
to kill him, and freshness of spirit to live without him, after he has
once entertained them with his most comforting discourses. Have you
listened to him, ever? He does this:--he plays to you your music (it is
he who first teaches thousands that they have any music at all, so guess
what a dear devil he is!); and when he has played this ravishing melody,
he falls to upon a burlesque contrast of hurdy-gurdy and bag-pipe squeal
and bellow and drone, which is meant for the music of the world. How
far sweeter was yours! This charming devil Sir Purcell had nursed from
childhood.

As a child, between a flighty mother and a father verging to insanity
from caprice, he had grown up with ideas of filial duty perplexed,
and with a fitful love for either, that was not attachment: a baffled
natural love, that in teaching us to brood on the hardness of our lot,
lays the foundation for a perniciously mystical self-love. He had waged
precociously philosophic, when still a junior. His father had kept
him by his side, giving him no profession beyond that of the obedient
expectant son and heir. His first allusion to the youth's dependency
had provoked their first breach, which had been widened by many an
ostentatious forgiveness on the one hand, and a dumbly-protesting
submission on the other. His mother died away from her husband's roof.
The old man then sought to obliterate her utterly. She left her boy a
little money, and the injunction of his father was, that he was never
to touch it. He inherited his taste for music from her, and his father
vowed, that if ever he laid hand upon a musical instrument again, he
would be disinherited. All these signs of a vehement spiteful antagonism
to reason, the young man might have treated more as his father's
misfortune than his own, if he could only have brought himse