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