authority. And the worst of it all, and the hardest thing for me to
stomach, was, that in all our controversies, for a long time, if he was
not always right, and I always wrong, I was quite sure to come out
second best, in the judgment of his friends and worshippers, who had no
sympathy for anybody who ventured to tilt with their champion.
Nevertheless I persisted, and, not standing much in awe of the pedant
and the pedagogue, however much I admired the logician and the poet or
the lawyer, I lost no opportunity of asserting my independence, and
took, I am afraid, a sort of malicious pleasure in showing that I had
views and opinions of my own, and was determined to do my own thinking,
come what might. For a while this operated against me,--if not always
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