It
is sufficient for my own contentment that they have preserved me
from being scandalous, or remarkable on the defective side. But
besides that, I shall here speak of myself only in relation to the
subject of these precedent discourses, and shall be likelier thereby
to fall into the contempt than rise up to the estimation of most
people. As far as my memory can return back into my past life,
before I knew or was capable of guessing what the world, or glories,
or business of it were, the natural affections of my soul gave me a
secret bent of aversion from them, as some plants are said to turn
away from others, by an antipathy imperceptible to themselves and
inscrutable to man's understanding. Even when I was a very young
boy at school, instead of running about on holidays and playing with
my fellows, I was wont to steal from them and walk into the fields,
either alone with a book, or with some one companion, if I could
find any of the same temper. I was then, too, so much an enemy to
all constraint, that my masters could never prevail on me, by any
persuasions or encouragements, to learn without book the common
rules of grammar, in which they dispensed with me alone, because
they found I made a shift to do the usual exercises out of my own
reading and observation.
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