ways
with Mr. Pierpont, certainly with all his immediate personal friends and
family; but in time, I believe, he began to like me the better for my
presumption, or foolhardiness, in battling the watch with him, whenever
he laid down a proposition, with a calm, dictatorial air, which did not
strike me at first either as clearly self-evident, or, after a thorough
investigation, as indisputably true, so that I do on my conscience
believe that I was fast growing, not only unmanageable, but unbearable.

Mr. Pierpont was no judge of painting, though he relished a good
picture, and had no taste for drawing, or rather no talent for drawing,
though he saw readily enough certain errors of exaggeration that
abounded in the engravings of the day; and I well remember his calling
my attention to the preposterously small feet of the female figures for
which Messrs. Draper and Company, the bank-note engravers of that day,
were so famous; and yet his handwriting was very beautiful, and the
ciphers I have mentioned were neither more nor less than exquisite
drawings. Nor had he any ear for music, to borrow the language we hear
at every turn,--as if all persons who are not deaf by nature had not
ears for music, so far as they can hear at all,--or as if he who can
distinguish voices, or learn a language, so far as to be understood when
he talks it, had not necessarily an ear for music, in other words, an
ear for sounds and for the rhythm of speech; but he was deficient in the
organ of tune, phrenologically speaking, though I have heard him
warble a Scotch air on the flute with uncommon sweetness--and
feebleness--without _tonguing_, and play two or three other tunes, which
had been adapted in the choir of his church, upon glass goblets, partly
filled with water and set upon a table before him, as if he enjoyed
every touch and thrill,--his long, thin fingers travelling over the damp
edges of the glass, and bringing forth "Bonnie Doon," or "There's
nothing true but Heaven,"--with his cuffs rolled up as if he were
driving a lathe, and turning off some of the little thin boxes and other
exquisite toys, in wood or ivory, which he was addicted to, about
fifteen years ago, in what he called his workshop. Like Johnson,
however, and Alexander Pope, who, according to Leigh Hunt,

"Spoiled the ears of the town
With his cuckoo-song verses, two up and two down,"

he must have had "time" large; for the music of his rhythm was
absolu