ed my having been present, expressing a
hope that I should remember the circumstance for the rest of my life.
'But,' said I, 'Mama, they did not give me a penny, as I had been told
they would.' 'Oh,' said she, recanting her praises, 'if that was your
motive, you were very properly disappointed.'

My last impression was having a glimpse of her on passing the door of
her bedroom during her last illness, when she was reclining in her easy
chair. An intimate friend of hers, Miss Hamilton by name, who was used
to visit her at Cockermouth, told me that she once said to her, that the
only one of her five children about whose future life she was anxious,
was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable either for good or
for evil. The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and
violent temper; so much so that I remember going once into the attics of
my grandfather's house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put
upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils
which I knew was kept there. I took the foil in hand, but my heart
failed. Upon another occasion, while I was at my grandfather's house at
Penrith, along with my eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops
together in the large drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid
down upon particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family
pictures, and I said to my brother, 'Dare you strike your whip through
that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I won't.' 'Then,' said I,
'here goes;' and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for
which no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished. But
possibly, from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I had
become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud
of it than otherwise.

[17] See Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part III. Sonnet xxii. 'On
Catechising.'

Of my earliest days at school I have little to say, but that they were
very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty, then and in the
vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For example, I read all
Fielding's works, _Don Quixote, Gil Blas,_ and any part of Swift that I
liked; _Gulliver's Travels,_ and the _Tale of the Tub,_ being both much
to my taste. I was very much indebted to one of the ushers of Hawkshead
School, by name Shaw, who taught me more of Latin in a fortnight than I
had learnt during two preceding years at the school of Cockermouth.
Unfortunately for