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CHAPTER XII.

MY BROTHER.

THE reader who may have accompanied me in these wandering memorials of my own life and casual experiences, will be aware, that in many cases the neglect of chronological order is not merely permitted, but is in fact to some degree inevitable: there are cases, for instance, which, as a whole, connect themselves with my own life at so many different eras, that, upon any chronological principle of position, it would have been difficult to assign them a proper place; backwards or forwards they must have leaped, in whatever place they had been introduced; and in their entire compass, from first to last, never could have been represented as properly belonging to any one present time, whensoever that had been selected belonging to every place alike, they would belong, according to the proverb, to no place at all; or, (reversing that proverb,) belonging to no place by preferable right, they would, in fact, belong to every place, and therefore to this place.

The incidents I am now going to relate come under this rule; for they form part of a story which fell in with my own life at many different points. It is a story taken from the life of my own brother; and I dwell on it with the more willingness, because it furnishes an indirect lesson

upon a great principle of social life, now and for many years back struggling for its just supremacy - the principle that all corporal punishments whatsoever, and upon whomsoever inflicted, are hateful, and an indignity to our common nature, which (with or without our consent) is enshrined in the person of the sufferer. Degrading him, they degrade us. I will not here add one word upon the general thesis, but go on to the facts of this case; which, if all its incidents could be now recovered, was perhaps as romantic as any that ever yet has tried the spirit of fortitude and patience in a child. But its moral interest depends upon this— that, simply out of one brutal chastisement, arose naturally the entire series of events which so very nearly made shipwreck of all hope for one individual, and did in fact poison the tranquillity of a whole family for seven years.

My next brother, younger by about four years than myself, (he, in fact, that caused so much affliction to the Sultan Amurath,) was a boy of exquisite and delicate beauty — delicate, that is, in respect to its feminine elegance and bloom ; for else (as regards constitution) he turned out remarkably robust. In such excess did his beauty flourish during childhood, that those who remember him and myself at the public school at Bath will also remember the ludicrous molestation in the streets (for to him it was molestation) which it entailed upon him—ladies stopping continually to kiss him. On first coming up to Bath from Greenhay, my mother occupied the very apartments on the North Parade just quitted by Edmund Burke, then in a decaying condition, though he did not die (I believe) till 1797. That state of Burke's health, connected with the expectation of finding him still there, brought for some weeks crowds of inquirers, many of whom saw the childish Adonis, then scarcely seven years old, and inflicted upon him what he viewed as the martyrdom of their caresses. Thus began a persecution which con

tinued as long as his years allowed it. The most brilliant complexion that could be imagined, the features of an Antinous, and perfect symmetry of figure at that period of his life, (afterwards he lost it,) made him the subject of neverending admiration to the whole female population, gentle and simple, who passed him in the streets. In after days, he had the grace to regret his own perverse and scornful coyness. But, at that time, so foolishly insensible was he to the honor, that he used to kick and struggle with all his might to liberate himself from the gentle violence which was continually offered; and he renewed the scene (so elaborately painted by Shakspeare) of the conflicts between Venus and Adonis. For two years this continued a subject of irritation the keenest on the one side, and of laughter on the other, between my brother and his plainer schoolfellows. Not that we had the slightest jealousy on the subject far from it; it struck us all (as it generally does strike boys) in the light of an attaint upon the dignity of a male, that he should be subjected to the caresses of women, without leave asked; this was felt to be a badge of childhood, and a proof that the object of such caressing tenderness, so public and avowed, must be regarded in the light of a baby — not to mention that the very foundation of all this distinction, a beautiful face, is as a male distinction regarded in a very questionable light by multitudes, and often by those most who are the possessors of that distinction. Certainly that was the fact in my brother's case. Not one of us could feel so pointedly as himself the ridicule of his situation; nor did he cease, when increasing years had liberated him from that female expression of delight in his beauty, to regard the beauty itself as a degradation; nor could he bear to be flattered upon it; though, in reality, it did him service in after distresses, when no other endowment whatsoever would have been availing. Often, in fact,

do men's natures sternly contradict the promise of their features; for no person would have believed that, under the blooming loveliness of a Narcissus, lay shrouded a most heroic nature; not merely an adventurous courage, but with a capacity of patient submission to hardship, and of wrestling with calamity, such as is rarely found amongst the endowments of youth. I have reason, also, to think that the state of degradation in which he believed himself to have passed his childish years, from the sort of public petting which I have described, and his strong recoil from it as an insult, went much deeper than was supposed, and had much to do in his subsequent conduct, and in nerving him to the strong resolutions he adopted. He seemed to resent, as an original insult of nature, the having given him a false index of character in his feminine beauty, and to take a pleasure in contradicting it. Had it been in his power, he would have spoiled it. Certain it is, that, from the time he reached his eleventh birthday, he had begun already to withdraw himself from the society of all other boys, to fall into long fits of abstraction, and to throw himself upon his own resources in a way neither usual nor necessary. Schoolfellows of his own age and standing—those, even, who were the most amiable — he shunned; and, many years after his disappearance, I found, in his handwriting, a collection of fragments, couched in a sort of wild lyrical verses, presenting, unquestionably, the most extraordinary evidences of a proud, self-sustained mind, consciously concentrating his own hopes in himself, and abjuring the rest of the world, that can ever have emanated from so young a person; since, upon the largest allowance, and supposing them to have been written on the eve of his quitting England, they must have been written at the age of twelve. I have often speculated on the subject of these mysterious compositions; they were of a nature to have proceeded rather from some mystical

quietist, such as Madame Guyon, if with this rapt devotion one can suppose the union of a rebellious and murmuring ambition. Passionate apostrophes there were to nature and the powers of nature; and what seemed strangest of all was, that, in style, not only were they free from all tumor and inflation which might have been looked for in so young a writer, but were even wilfully childish and colloquial in a pathetic degree-in fact, in point of tone, allowing for the difference between a narrative poem and a lyrical, they somewhat resemble that beautiful poem * of George Herbert, entitled LoVE UNKNOWN, in which he describes symbolically to a friend, under the form of treacherous ill sage he had experienced, the religious processes by which his soul had been weaned from the world. The most obvious solution of the mystery would be, to suppose these fragments to have been copied from some obscure author; but, besides that no author could have remained obscure in this age of elaborate research, who had been capable of sighs (for such I may call them) drawn up from such well-like depths of feeling, and expressed with such fervor and simplicity of language, there was another testimony to their being the productions of him who owned the penmanship; which was, that some of the papers exhibited the whole process of creation and growth, such as erasures, substitutions, doubts expressed as to this and that form of expression, together with references backwards and forwards. Now, that the handwriting was my brother's, admitted of no doubt whatsoever. I go on with his story. In 1800, my visit to Ireland, and visits to other places subsequently, separated me from him for above a year. In 1801, we were at very

*This poem, from great admiration of its mother English, and to illustrate some ideas upon style, Mr. Coleridge republished in his 'Biographia Literaria.”

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