specially
where boys are brought up with a view to pushing themselves in the world.
I was sixteen years of age and six feet high before I was allowed to
leave off short jackets, go to a theatre, or travel alone, all of which
was more injurious to me, I believe, than ordinary youthful dissipation
would have been, especially in America. Yet, while thus repressed, I was
being continually referred by all grown-up friends to enterprising youth
of my own age, who were making a living in bankers' or conveyancers'
offices, &c., and acting "like men." The result really being that I was
completely convinced that I was a person of feeble and inferior capacity
as regarded all that was worth doing or knowing in life, though Heaven
knows my very delicate health and long illnesses might of themselves have
excused all my failings. The vast majority of Americans, however kind
and generous they may be in other respects, are absolutely without mercy
or common-sense as regards the not succeeding in life or making money.
Such, at least, was my experience, and bitter it was. Elders often
forget that even obedience, civility, and morality in youth are luxuries
which must be paid for like all other extravagances at a high price,
especially in children of feeble constitution. The dear boy grows up "as
good as pie," and, being pious, "does not know one card from another,"
nor one human being from another. You make of him a fool, and then call
him one--I mean, what you regard as a fool. I am not at all sure that
one or two cruises in a slaver (there were plenty of them sailing out of
New York in those days) would not have done me far more good of a certain
kind than all the education I had till I left college in America. I am
not here complaining, as most weak men do, as if they were specially
victims to a wretched fate and a might-have-been-better. The vast
majority of boys have not better homes or education, kinder parents, or
advantages greater than mine were. But as I do not recall my boyhood's
days or my youth till I left college with that _joyousness_ which I find
in other men without exception, and as, in fact, there always seems as if
a cloud were over it all, while from below there was a low continual
murmur as of a patient soul in pain, I feel that there was something
wrong in it all, as there indeed was--the wrong of taking all the starch
out of a shirt, and then wondering that it was not stiff. But I must
say, at the same tim