No More Learning

I am convinced I owe to this practice much of
my critic craft, such as it is.

In my seventeenth year, to give my manners a brush, I went to a country
dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these
meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition
to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong
passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of
dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which
marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for
several years afterwards within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could
enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the
path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an
aperture I never could squeeze myself into it--the last I always
hated--there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of
aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well
from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a
constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude;
add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish
knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought,
something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem
surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited, or any
great wonder that always, where two or three met together, there was I
among them. But far beyond all other impulses of my heart, was _un
penchant a l' adorable moitie du genre humain. _ My heart was completely
tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other; and, as
in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was various; sometimes
I was received with favour, and sometimes I was mortified with a
repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook, I feared no competitor,
and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never cared farther
for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I spent the evenings
in the way after my own heart. A country lad seldom carries on a love
adventure without an assisting confidant.
I possessed a curiosity, zeal,
and intrepid dexterity that recommended me as a proper second on these
occasions; and I dare say, I felt as much pleasure in being in the
secret of half the loves of the parish of Tarbolton, as ever did
statesman in knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe. The
very goose feather in my hand seems to know instinctively the well-worn
path of my imagination, the favourite theme of my song; and is with
difficulty restrained from giving you a couple of paragraphs on the
love-adventures of my compeers, the humble inmates of the farm-house and
cottage; but the grave sons of science, ambition, or avarice baptize
these things by the name of follies. To the sons and daughters of labour
and poverty they are matters of the most serious nature: to them the
ardent hope, the stolen interview, the tender farewell, are the greatest
and most delicious parts of their enjoyments.

Another circumstance in my life which made some alteration in my mind
and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling
coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school to learn
mensuration, surveying, dialling, &c. , in which I made a pretty good
progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind.
The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it
sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried it on.
Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were, till this
time, new to me; but I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I
learnt to fill my glass, and to mix without fear in a drunken
squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry, till the
sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom,
when a charming fillette, who lived next door to the school, overset
my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the spheres of my
studies. I, however, struggled on with my sines and co-sines for a few
days more; but stepping into the garden one charming noon to take the
sun's altitude, there I met my angel,

"Like Proserpine gathering flowers,
Herself a fairer flower--"[176]

It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The
remaining week I stayed I did nothing but craze the faculties of my
soul about her, or steal out to meet her; and the two last nights of
my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this
modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless.

I returned home very considerably improved. My reading was enlarged
with the very important addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's works; I
had seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my
school-fellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This
improved me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by
the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I pored over them most devoutly. I
kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison
between them and the composition of most of my correspondents
flattered my vanity.