第8章 RECOLLECTIONS.(1)

It is remarkable that I was bred by hand,and ate nothing but milk till I was a twelvemonth old;from which time,to the eighth year of my age,I was observed to delight in pudding and potatoes;and,indeed,I retain a benevolence for that sort of food to this day.I do not remember that I distinguished myself in anything at those years but by my great skill at taw,for which I was so barbarously used that it has ever since given me an aversion to gaming.In my twelfth year,I suffered very much for two or three false concords.

At fifteen I was sent to the university,and stayed there for some time;but a drum passing by,being a lover of music,I listed myself for a soldier.As years came on,I began to examine things,and grew discontented at the times.This made me quit the sword,and take to the study of the occult sciences,in which I was so wrapped up that Oliver Cromwell had been buried,and taken up again,five years before I heard he was dead.This gave me first the reputation of a conjurer,which has been of great disadvantage to me ever since,and kept me out of all public employments.The greater part of my later years has been divided between Dick's coffee-house,the Trumpet in Sheer Lane,and my own lodgings.

From my own Apartment,June 5.

There are those among mankind who can enjoy no relish of their being except the world is made acquainted with all that relates to them,and think everything lost that passes unobserved;but others find a solid delight in stealing by the crowd,and modelling their life after such a manner as is as much above the approbation as the practice of the vulgar.Life being too short to give instances great enough of true friendship or good-will,some sages have thought it pious to preserve a certain reverence for the Manes of their deceased friends;and have withdrawn themselves from the rest of the world at certain seasons,to commemorate in their own thoughts such of their acquaintance who have gone before them out of this life.And indeed,when we are advanced in years,there is not a more pleasing entertainment than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have parted with that have been dear and agreeable to us,and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those with whom,perhaps,we have indulged ourselves in whole nights of mirth and jollity.With such inclinations in my heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening,and resolved to be sorrowful;upon which occasion I could not but look with disdain upon myself,that though all the reasons which I had to lament the loss of many of my friends are now as forcible as at the moment of their departure,yet did not my heart swell with the same sorrow which I felt at that time;but I could,without tears,reflect upon many pleasing adventures I have had with some,who have long been blended with common earth.Though it is by the benefit of nature that length of time thus blots out the violence of afflictions;yet with tempers too much given to pleasure,it is almost necessary to revive the old places of grief in our memory;and ponder step by step on past life,to lead the mind into that sobriety of thought which poises the heart,and makes it beat with due time,without being quickened with desire,or retarded with despair,from its proper and equal motion.When we wind up a clock that is out of order,to make it go well for the future,we do not immediately set the hand to the present instant,but we make it strike the round of all its hours,before it can recover the regularity of its time.Such,thought I,shall be my method this evening;and since it is that day of the year which I dedicate to the memory of such in another life as I much delighted in when living,an hour or two shall be sacred to sorrow and their memory,while I run over all the melancholy circumstances of this kind which have occurred to me in my whole life.