e whole allotment of man, even to the charm of
character, and the qualities which produce it.

Physically speaking, human nature can redress itself of climate, can
generate warmth in high latitudes, and cold at the equator; but in
respect to mind and manners, from the law of latitude there is no
appeal. Man, like the plants that grow for him, has a proper sky and
soil: with them to flourish, without them to fade; through either
kingdom, vegetable and moral, in situations that are aquatic, the alpine
nature cannot live.

All this applies to Hamilton wasting himself at Westminster. "Wild
nature's vigour working at his root;"

his situation should have been accordingly; where he might have spread
wide and struck deep.

With more than boyish aptitudes and abilities, he should not thus have
been lost among boys. His incessant intrepidity, his restless curiosity,
his undertaking spirit, all indicated early maturity; all should have
led to pursuits, if not better, at least of more pith and moment than
the mere mechanism of dead language!

This by Hamilton (disdaining as a business what as an amusement perhaps
might have delighted him) was deemed a dead letter, and as such,
neglected; while he bestowed himself on other mechanism, presenting more
material objects to the mind.

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Exercises out of school took place of exercises within. Not that like
Sackville or Hawkins, he had a ball at every leisure moment in his
hand; but, preferably to fives or cricket, he would amuse himself in
mechanical pursuits; little in themselves, but great as to what they
might have been convertible.

In the fourth form, he produced a red shoe of his own making. And though
he never made a pocket watch, and probably might mar many, yet all the
interior machinery he knew and could name. The whole movement he took to
pieces, and replaced.

The man who is to find out the longitude, cannot have beginnings; better
than these. Count Bruhl, since Madge's death, the best watch-maker of
his time, did not raise more early wonder.

Besides this, Hamilton was to be found in every daring oddity. Lords
Burlington and Kent, in all their rage for porticos, were nothing to him
in a rage for pediments.

For often has the morning caught him scaling the high pediments of the
school-door, and at peril of Ins life clambering down, opening the door
within, before the boy who kept the gate could come with the key. His
evenings set upon no