a leg." On which the child, with flashing eyes, cutting at her with a
baby's whip, cried out, "Dinna speak of it." His mother herself, in her
violent fits, when the boy ran round the room laughing at her attempts to
catch him, used to say he was a little dog, as bad as his father, and to
call him "a lame brat"--an incident, which, notoriously suggested the
opening scene of the _Deformed Transformed_. In the height of his
popularity he fancied that the beggars and street-sweepers in London were
mocking him. He satirized and discouraged dancing; he preferred riding and
swimming to other exercises, because they concealed his weakness; and on
his death-bed asked to be blistered in such a way that he might not be
called on to expose it. The Countess Guiccioli, Lady Blessington, and
others, assure us that in society few would have observed the defect if he
had not referred to it; but it was never far from the mind, and therefore
never far from the mouth, of the least reticent of men.

In 1792 he was sent to a rudimentary day school of girls and boys, taught
by a Mr. Bowers, where he seems to have learnt nothing save to repeat
monosyllables by rote. He next passed through the hands of a devout and
clever clergyman, named Ross, under whom according to his own account he
made astonishing progress, being initiated into the study of Roman
history, and taking special delight in the battle of Regillus. Long
afterwards, when standing on the heights of Tusculum and looking down on
the little round lake, he remembered his young enthusiasm and his old
instructor. He next came under the charge of a tutor called Paterson, whom
he describes as "a very serious, saturnine, but kind young man. He was the
son of my shoemaker, but a good scholar. With him I began Latin, and
continued till I went to the grammar school, where I threaded all the
classes to the fourth, when I was recalled to England by the demise of my
uncle."