Nevertheless, he was no
girl; he was a genuine _son_ of the South. Such was the violence of
his passions, that, before he was four years old, he sometimes in a
fit of anger fell senseless upon the floor, and was restored only
after much effort. His step-father, who was an honorable man, seems
never to have attempted either to control his passions or develop his
intellect. He grew up, as many boys of Virginia did, and do,
unchecked, unguided, untrained. Turned loose in a miscellaneous
library, nearly every book he read tended to intensify his feelings or
inflame his imagination. His first book was Voltaire's Charles XII.,
and a better book for a boy has never been written. Then he fell upon
the Spectator. Before he was twelve he had read the Arabian Nights,
Orlando, Robinson Crusoe, Smollett's Works, Reynard the Fox, Don
Quixote, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Gulliver, Shakespeare, Plutarch's Lives,
Pope's Homer, Goldsmith's Rome, Percy's Reliques, Thomson's Seasons,
Young, Gray, and Chatterton,--a gallon of sack to a penny's worth of
bread. A good steady drill in arithmetic, geography, and language
might have given his understanding a chance; but this ill-starred boy
never had a steady drill in anything.
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