Not a syllable of such speeches was lost upon me: the idea of a man of genius and of an idle dog were soon so firmly joined together in my imagination, that it was impossible to separate them, either by my own reason or by that of my preceptors. I gloried in the very habits which my tutors laboured to correct; and I never was seriously mortified by the consequences of my own folly till, at a public examination at Eton, I lost a premium by putting off till it was too late the finishing a copy of verses. The lines which I had written were said by all my young and old friends to be beautiful. The prize was gained by one Johnson, a heavy lad, of no sort of genius, but of great perseverance. His verses were finished, however, at the stated time.
“For dulness ever must be regular!”
My fragment, charming as it was, was useless, except to hand about afterward among my friends, to prove what I might have done if I had thought it worth while.
My father was extremely vexed by my missing an opportunity of distinguishing myself at this public exhibition, especially as the king had honoured the assembly with his presence; and as those who had gained premiums were presented to his majesty, it was supposed that their being thus early marked as lads of talents would be highly advantageous to their advancement in life. All this my father felt, and, blaming himself for having encouraged me in the indolence of genius, he determined to counteract his former imprudence, and was resolved, he said, to cure me at once of my habit of procrastination. For this purpose he took down from his shelves Young’s Night Thoughts; from which he remembered a line, which has become a stock line among writing-masters’ copies:
“Procrastination is the thief of time.”
He hunted the book for the words Procrastination, Time, To-day, and To-morrow, and made an extract of seven long pages on the dangers of delay.
“Now, my dear Basil,” said he, “this is what will cure you for life, and this you must get perfectly by heart, before I give you one shilling more pocket-money.”
The motive was all powerful, and with pains, iteration, and curses, I fixed the heterogeneous quotations so well in my memory that some of them have remained there to this day. For instance —
“Time destroyed
Is suicide, where more than blood is spilt.
Time flies, death urges, knells call, Heav’n invites,
Hell threatens.
We push Time from us, and we wish him back.
Man flies from Time, and Time from man too soon;
In sad divorce this double flight must end;
And then where are we?
Be wise to-day, ’tis madness to defer, &c.
Next day the fatal precedent will plead, &c.
Lorenzo — O for yesterdays to come!
To-day is yesterday return’d; return’d,
Full powered to cancel, expiate, raise, adorn,
And reinstate us on the rock of peace.
Let it not share its predecessor’s fate,
Nor, like its elder sisters, die a fool.
Where shall I find him? Angels! tell me where:
You know him; he is near you; point him out;
Shall I see glories beaming from his brow?
Or trace his footsteps by the rising flow’rs?
Your golden wings now hov’ring o’er him shed
Protection: now are wav’ring in applause
To that blest son of foresight! Lord of fate!
That awful independent on to-morrow!
Whose work is done; who triumphs in the past;
Whose yesterdays look backward with a smile.”
I spare you the rest of my task, and I earnestly hope, my dear reader, that these citations may have a better effect upon you than they had upon me. With shame I confess, that even with the addition of Shakspeare’s eloquent
“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,” &c.
which I learnt by heart gratis, not a bit the better was I for all this poetical morality. What I wanted was, not conviction of my folly, but resolution to amend.
When I say that I was not a bit the better for these documentings, I must not omit to observe to you that I was very near four hundred pounds a year the better for them.
Being obliged to learn so much of Young’s Night Thoughts by rote, I was rather disgusted, and my attention was roused to criticise the lines which had been forced upon my admiration. Afterward, when I went to college, I delighted to maintain, in opposition to some of my companions, who were enthusiastic admirers of Young, that he was no poet. The more I was ridiculed, the more I persisted. I talked my self into notice; I became acquainted with several of the literary men at Cambridge; I wrote in defence of my opinion, or, as some called it, my heresy. I maintained that what all the world had mistaken for sublimity was bombast; that the Night Thoughts were fuller of witty conceits than of poetical images: I drew a parallel between Young and Cowley; and I finished by pronouncing Young to be the Cowley of the eighteenth century. To do myself justice, there was much ingenuity and some truth in my essay, but it was the declamation of a partisan, who can think only on one side of a question, and who, in the heat of controversy, says more than he thinks, and more than he originally intended.
It is often the fortune of literary partisans to obtain a share of temporary celebrity far beyond their deserts, especially if they attack any writer of established reputation. The success of my essay exceeded my most sanguine expectations, and I began to think that my father was right; that I was born to be a great genius, and a great man. The notice taken of me by a learned prelate, who piqued himself upon being considered as the patron of young men of talents, confirmed me at once in my self-conceit and my hopes of preferment.
I mentioned to you that my father, in honour of my namesake Basil, bishop of Caesarea, and to verify his own presentiments, had educated me for the Church. My present patron, who seemed to like me the better the oftener I dined with him, gave me reason to hope that he would provide for me handsomely. I was not yet ordained, when a living of four hundred per annum fell into his gift: he held it over for some months, as it was thought, on purpose for me.
In the mean time he employed me to write a charity sermon for him, which he was to preach, as it was expected, to a crowded congregation. None but those who are themselves slaves to the habit of procrastination will believe that I could be so foolish as to put off writing this sermon till the Saturday evening before it was wanted. Some of my young companions came unexpectedly to sup with me; we sat late: in the vanity of a young author, who glories in the rapidity of composition, I said to myself that I could finish my sermon in an hour’s notice. But, alas! when my companions at length departed, they left me in no condition to complete a sermon. I fell fast asleep, and was wakened in the morning by the bishop’s servant. The dismay I felt is indescribable; I started up — it was nine o’clock: I began to write; but my hand and my mind trembled, and my ideas were in such confusion, that I could not, great genius as I was, produce a beginning sentence in a quarter of an hour.
I kept the bishop’s servant forty minutes by his watch; wrote and re-wrote two pages, and walked up and down the room; tore my two pages; and at last, when the footman said he could wait no longer, was obliged to let him go with an awkward note, pleading sudden sickness for my apology. It was true that I was sufficiently sick at the time when I penned this note: my head ached terribly; and I kept my room, reflecting upon my own folly, the whole of the day. I foresaw the consequences: the living was given away by my patron the next morning, and all hopes of future favour were absolutely at an end.
My father overwhelmed me with reproaches; and I might perhaps have been reformed by this disappointment, but an unexpected piece of good fortune, or what I then thought good fortune, was my ruin.
Among the multitude of my college-friends was a young gentleman, whose father was just appointed to go out upon the famous embassy to China; he came to our shop to buy Du Halde; and upon hearing me express an enthusiastic desire to visit China, he undertook to apply to his fat
her to take me in the ambassador’s suite. His representation of me as a young man of talents and literature, and the view of some botanical drawings, which I executed upon the spur of the occasion with tolerable neatness, procured me the favour which I so ardently desired.
My father objected to my making this voyage. He was vexed to see me quit the profession for which I had been educated; and he could not, without a severe struggle, relinquish his hopes of seeing me a bishop. But I argued that, as I had not yet been ordained, there could be no disgrace or impropriety in my avoiding a mode of life which was not suited to my genius. This word genius had now, as upon all other occasions, a mighty effect upon my father; and, observing this, I declared farther, in a high tone of voice, that from the experience I had already had, I was perfectly certain that the drudgery of sermon-writing would paralyze my genius; and that, to expand and invigorate my intellectual powers, it was absolutely necessary I should, to use a great author’s expression, “view in foreign countries varied modes of existence.”
My father’s hopes that one half of his prophecy would at least be accomplished, and that I should become a great author, revived; and he consented to my going to China, upon condition that I should promise to write a history of my voyage and journey, in two volumes octavo, or one quarto, with a folio of plates. The promise was readily made; for in the plenitude of confidence in my own powers, octavos and quartos shrunk before me, and a folio appeared too small for the various information, and the useful reflections, which a voyage to China must supply.
Full of expectations and projects, I talked from morning till night of my journey: but notwithstanding my father’s hourly remonstrances, I deferred my preparations till the last week. Then all was hurry and confusion; tailors and sempstresses, portmanteaus and trunks, portfolios and drawing-boxes, water-colours, crayons, and note-books, wet from the stationer’s, crowded my room. I had a dozen small note-books, and a huge commonplace-book, which was to be divided and kept in the manner recommended by the judicious and immortal Locke.
In the midst of the last day’s bustle, I sat down at the corner of a table with compass, ruler, and red ink, to divide and rule my best of all possible commonplace-books; but the red ink was too thin, and the paper was not well sized, and it blotted continually, because I was obliged to turn over the pages rapidly; and ink will not dry, nor blotting-paper suck it up, more quickly for a genius than for any other man. Besides, my attention was much distracted by the fear that the sempstress would not send home my dozen of new shirts, and that a vile procrastinating boot-maker would never come with my boots. Every rap at the door I started up to inquire whether that was the shirts, or the boots: thrice I overturned the red, and twice the black ink bottles by these starts; and the execrations which I bestowed upon those tradespeople, who will put off every thing to the last moment, were innumerable. I had orders to set off in the mail-coach for Portsmouth, to join the rest of the ambassador’s suite.
The provoking watchman cried “past eleven o’clock” before I had half-finished ruling my commonplace-book; my shirts and my boots were not come: the mail-coach, as you may guess, set off without me. My poor father was in a terrible tremor, and walked from room to room, reproaching me and himself; but I persisted in repeating that Lord M. would not set out the day he had intended: that nobody, since the creation of the world, ever set out upon a long journey the day he first appointed: besides, there were at least a hundred chances in my favour that his lordship would break down on his way to Portsmouth; that the wind would not be fair when he arrived there; that half the people in his suite would not be more punctual than myself, &c.
By these arguments, or by mere dint of assertion, I quieted my father’s apprehensions and my own, and we agreed that, as it was now impossible to go to-day, it was best to stay till to-morrow.
Upon my arrival at Portsmouth, the first thing I heard was that the Lion and Hindostan had sailed some hours before, with the embassy for China. Despair deprived me of utterance. A charitable waiter at the inn, however, seeing my consternation and absolute inability to think or act for myself, ran to make farther inquiries, and brought me back the joyful tidings that the Jackal brig, which was to carry out the remainder of the ambassador’s suite, was not yet under weigh; that a gentleman, who was to go in the Jackal, had dined at an hotel in the next street, and that he had gone to the water-side but ten minutes ago.
I hurried after him: the boat was gone. I paid another exorbitantly to take me and my goods to the brig, and reached the Jackal just as she was weighing anchor. Bad education for me! The moment I felt myself safe on board, having recovered breath to speak, I exclaimed, “Here am I, safe and sound! just as well as if I had been here yesterday; better indeed. Oh, after this, I shall always trust to my own good fortune! I knew I should not be too late.” When I came to reflect coolly, however, I was rather sorry that I had missed my passage in the Lion, with my friend and protector, and with most of the learned and ingenious men of the ambassador’s suite, to whom I had been introduced, and who had seemed favourably disposed towards me. All the advantage I might have derived from their conversation, during this long voyage, was lost by my own negligence. The Jackal lost company of the Lion and Hindostan in the Channel. As my friends afterwards told me, they waited for us five days in Praya Bay; but as no Jackal appeared, they sailed again without her. At length, to our great joy, we descried on the beach of Sumatra a board nailed to a post, which our friends had set up there, with a written notice to inform us that the Lion and Hindostan had touched on this shore on such a day, and to point out to us the course that we should keep in order to join them.
At the sight of this writing my spirits revived: the wind favoured us; but, alas! in passing the Straits of Banka, we were damaged so that we were obliged to return to port to refit, and to take in fresh provision. Not a soul on board but wished it had been their fate to have had a berth in the other ships; and I more loudly than any one else expressed this wish twenty times a-day. When my companions heard that I was to have sailed in the ambassador’s ship, if I had been time enough at Spithead, some pitied and some rallied me: but most said I deserved to be punished for my negligence. At length we joined the Lion and Hindostan at North Island. Our friends had quite given up all hopes of ever seeing us again, and had actually bought at Batavia a French brig, to supply the place of the Jackal. To my great satisfaction, I was now received on board the Lion, and had an opportunity of conversing with the men of literature and science, from whom I had been so unluckily separated during the former part of the voyage. Their conversation soon revived and increased my regret, when they told me of all that I had missed seeing at the various places where they had touched: they talked to me with provoking fluency of the culture of manioc; of the root of cassada, of which tapioca is made; of the shrub called the cactus, on which the cochineal insect swarms and feeds; and of the ipecacuanha-plant; all which they had seen at Rio Janeiro, besides eight paintings representing the manner in which the diamond and gold mines in the Brazils are worked. Indeed, upon cross-examination, I found that these pictures were miserably executed, and scarcely worth seeing.
I regretted more the fine pine-apples, which my companions assured me were in such abundance that they cleaned their swords in them, as being the cheapest acid that could be there procured. But, far beyond these vulgar objects of curiosity, I regretted not having learned any thing concerning the celebrated upas-tree. I was persuaded that, if I had been at Batavia, I should have extracted some information more precise than these gentlemen obtained from the keepers of the medical garden.
I confess that my mortification at this disappointment did not arise solely from the pure love of natural history: the upas-tree would have made a conspicuous figure in my quarto volume. I consoled myself, however, by the determination to omit nothing that the vast empire of China could afford to render my work entertaining, instructive, interesting, and sublime. I anticipated the pride with which I should receive the compliments of my fri
ends and the public upon my valuable and incomparable work; I anticipated the pleasure with which my father would exult in the celebrity of his son, and in the accomplishment of his own prophecies; and, with these thoughts full in my mind, we landed at Mettow, in China.
I sat up late at night writing a sketch of my preface and notes for the heads of chapters. I was tired, fell into a profound sleep, dreamed I was teaching the emperor of China to pronounce ‘chrononhotonthologos,’ and in the morning was wakened by the sound of the gong; the signal that the accommodation junks were ready to sail with the embassy to Pekin. I hurried on my clothes, and was in the junk before the gong had done beating. I gloried in my celerity; but before we had gone two leagues up the country, I found reason to repent of my precipitation: I wanted to note down my first impressions on entering the Chinese territories; but, alas! I felt in vain in my pocket for my pencil and note-book: I had left them both behind me on my bed. Not only one note-book, but my whole dozen; which, on leaving London, I had stuffed into a bag with my night-gown. Bag, night-gown, note-books, all were forgotten! However trifling it may appear, this loss of the little note-books was of material consequence. To be sure, it was easy to procure paper and make others; but, because it was so easy, it was delayed from hour to hour, and from day to day; and I went on writing my most important remarks on scraps of paper, which were always to be copied to-morrow into a note-book that was then to be made.
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