aside and subjected to the action of surrounding causes.

During the earlier years of the plastic age, my ancestor was
observed to betray strong feelings of compassion at the sight of
charity-children, nor was he ever known to pass a child, especially
a boy that was still in petticoats, who was crying with hunger in
the streets, without sharing his own crust with him. Indeed, his
practice on this head was said to be steady and uniform, whenever
the rencontre took place after my worthy father had had his own
sympathies quickened by a good dinner; a fact that maybe imputed to
a keener sense of the pleasure he was about to confer.

After sixteen, he was known to converse occasionally on the subject
of politics, a topic on which he came to be both expert and eloquent
before twenty. His usual theme was justice and the sacred rights of
man, concerning which he sometimes uttered very pretty sentiments,
and such as were altogether becoming in one who was at the bottom of
the great social pot that was then, as now, actively boiling, and
where he was made to feel most, the heat that kept it in
ebullition. I am assured that on the subject of taxation, and on
that of the wrongs of America and Ireland, there were few youths in
the parish who could discourse with more zeal and unction. About
this time, too, he was heard shouting "Wilkes and liberty!" in the
public streets.

But, as is the case with all men of rare capacities, there was a
concentration of powers in the mind of my ancestor, which soon
brought all his errant sympathies, the mere exuberance of acute and
overflowing feelings, into a proper and useful subjection, centring
all in the one absorbing and capacious receptacle of self. I do not