Rattlin the Reefer | Page 8

the
description itself necessarily so. Pride, and contempt for our
fellow-creatures, evince a low tone of moral feeling, and is the innate
vulgarity of the soul; it is this which but too often makes those who
rustle in silks and roll in carriages, lower than the lowest.
I have said this much, because the early, very early part of my life was

passed among what are reproachfully termed "low people." If I describe
them faithfully, they must still appear low to those who arrogate to
themselves the epithet of "high." For myself; I hold that there is nothing
low under the sun, except meanness. Where there is utility there ought
to be honour. The utility of the humble artisan has never been denied,
though too often despised, and too rarely honoured; but I have found
among the "vulgar" a horror of meanness, a self-devotion, an
unshrinking patience under privation, and the moral courage, that
constitute the hero of high life. I can also tell the admirers of the great,
that the evil passions of the vulgar are as gigantic, their wickedness
upon as grand a scale, and their notions of vice as refined, and as
extensive, as those of any fashionable roue that is courted among the
first circles, or even as those of the crowned despot. Then, as to the
strength of vulgar intellect: True, that intellect is rarely cultivated by
the learning which consists of words. The view it takes of science is but
a partial glance--that intellect is contracted, but it is strong. It is a dwarf;
with the muscle and sinews of a giant; and its grasp, whenever it can
lay hold of anything within its circumscribed reach, is tremendous. The
general who has conquered armies and subjugated countries--the
minister who has ruined them, and the jurist who has justified both,
never at the crisis of their labours have displayed a tithe of the
ingenuity and the resources of mind that many an artisan is forced to
exert to provide daily bread for himself and family; or many a
shopkeeper to keep his connection together, and himself out of the
workhouse. Why should the exertions of intellect be termed low, in the
case of the mechanic, and vast, profound, and glorious, in that of the
minister? It is the same precious gift of a beneficent power to all his
creatures. As well may the sun be voted as excessively vulgar, because
it, like intellect, assists all equally to perform their functions. I repeat,
that nothing that has mind is, of necessity, low; and nothing is vulgar
but meanness.
CHAPTER FIVE.
I RECEIVE MY FIRST LESSONS IN PUGNACITY--AND IMBIBE
THE EVIL SPIRIT-- LEARN TO READ BY INTUITION, AND TO
FIGHT BY PRACTICE--GO TO SCHOOL TO A SOLDIER--AM A

GOOD BOY AND GET WHIPPED.
At six years of age my health had become firmly established, but this
establishment caused dismay in that of Joe Brandon. As I was no
longer the sickly infant that called for incessant attention and the most
careful nurture, it was intimated to my foster-parents that a
considerable reduction would be made in the quarterly allowance paid
on my account. The indignation of Brandon was excessive. He looked
upon himself as one grievously wronged. No sinecurist, with his
pension recently reduced, could have been more vehement on the
subject of the sanctity of vested rights. But his ire was not to be vented
in idle declamation only. He was not a man to rest content with mere
words: he declaimed for a full hour upon his wife's folly in procuring
him the means of well-fed idleness so long, threatened to take the
brat--meaning no less a personage than myself--to the workhouse: and
then wound up affairs, indoors, by beating his wife, and himself, out of
doors, by getting royally drunk.
This was the first scene that made a deep impression on me. Young as I
was, I comprehended that I was the cause of the ill-treatment of my
nurse, whom I fondly loved. I interfered--I placed my little body
between her and her brutal oppressor. I scratched, I kicked, I
screamed--I grew mad with passion. At that hour, the spirit of evil and
of hate blew the dark coal in my heart into a flame; and the demon of
violent anger has ever since found it too easy to erect there his altar, of
which the fire, though, at the time, all-consuming, is never durable.
From that moment I commenced my intellectual existence. I looked on
the sobbing mother, and knew what it was to love, and my love found
its expression in an agony of tears. I looked on the tyrant, I felt what it
was to hate, and endeavoured to relieve the burning desire to punish
with frantic actions and wild outcries. Old Ford,