Even in my earliest years at school, you will hardly imagine how uneasy constraint of every kind was to me, and with what delight I broke away from the customary sports and pastimes of that age, to saunter the time away by myself, or with a companion, if I could meet with any such, of my own humour. The same inclination pursued me to college; where a private walk, with a book or friend, was beyond any amusement, which, in that sprightly season of life, I had any acquaintance with. It is with a fond indulgence my memory even now returns to these past pleasures. It was in those retired ramblings that a thousand charming perceptions and bright ideas would stream in upon me. The Muse was kindest in those hours: and, I know not how, Philosophy herself would oftner meet me amidst the willows of the Cam, than in the formal schools of science, within the walls of my college, or in my tutor’s chamber.
I understand, said I, the true secret of that matter. You had now contracted an intimacy with the poets, and others of the fanciful tribe. You was even admitted of their company; and it was but fit you should adopt their sentiments, and speak their language. Hence those day-dreams of shade and silence, and I know not what visions, which transport the minds of young men, on their entrance into these regions of Parnassus.
It should seem then, returned he, by your way of expressing it, as if you thought this passion for shade and silence was only pretended to on a principle of fashion; or, at most, was catched by the lovers of poetry from each other, in the way of sympathy, without nature’s having any hand at all in the production of it.
Something like that, I told him, was my real sentiment: and that these agreeable reveries of the old poets had done much hurt by being taken too seriously. Were Horace and Virgil, think you, as much in earnest as you appear to be, when they were crying out perpetually on their favourite theme of otium and secessus, “they, who lived and died in a court?”
I believe, said he, they were, and that the short accounts we have of their lives shew it, though a perfect dismission from the court was what they could not obtain, or had not the resolution to insist upon. But pray, upon your principles, that all this is but the enchantment of example or fashion, how came it to pass, that the first seducers of the family, the old poets themselves, had fallen into these notions? They were surely no pretenders. They could only write from the heart. And methinks it were more candid, as well as more reasonable, to account for this passion, which hath so constantly shewn itself in their successors, from the same reason. It is likely indeed, and so much I can readily allow, that the early reading of the poets might contribute something to confirm and strengthen my natural bias[36].
But let the matter rest for the present. I would now go on with the detail of my own life and experience, so proper, as I think, to convince you that what I am pleading for is the result of nature.
I was saying how agreeably my youth passed in these reveries, if you will have it so, and especially inter sylvas academi:
Dura sed emovere loco me tempora grato,
Civilisque rudem belli tulit æstus in arma.
You know the consequence. This civil turmoil drove me from the shelter of retirement into the heat and bustle of life; from those studies which, as you say, had enchanted my youth, into business and action of all sorts. I lived in the world: I conversed familiarly with the great. A change like this, one would suppose, were enough to undo the prejudices of education. But the very reverse happened. The further I engaged, and the longer I continued in this scene, the greater my impatience was of retiring from it.
But you will say, my old vice was nourished in me by living in the neighbourhood of books and letters[37]. I was yet in the fairy land of the Muses; and, under these circumstances, it was no wonder that neither arms nor business, nor a court, could prevent the mind from returning to its old bias. All this may be true. And yet, I think, if that court had contained many such persons as some I knew in it, neither the distractions of business on the one hand, nor the blandishments of the Muse on the other, could have disposed me to leave it. But there were few Lord Falklands—and unhappily my admiration of that nobleman’s worth and honour[38] created an invincible aversion to the rest, who had little resemblance of his virtues.