who was an honorable man, seems never to have attempted either to control his passions or develop his intellect.  He grew up, as many boys of Virginia did, and do, unchecked, unguided, untrained.  Turned loose in a miscellaneous library, nearly every book he read tended to intensify his feelings or inflame his imagination.  His first book was Voltaire’s Charles XII., and a better book for a boy has never been written.  Then he fell upon the Spectator.  Before he was twelve he had read the Arabian Nights, Orlando, Robinson Crusoe, Smollett’s Works, Reynard the Fox, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, Tom Jones, Gulliver, Shakespeare, Plutarch’s Lives, Pope’s Homer, Goldsmith’s Rome, Percy’s Reliques, Thomson’s Seasons, Young, Gray, and Chatterton,—­a gallon of sack to a penny’s worth of bread.  A good steady drill in arithmetic, geography, and language might have given his understanding a chance; but this ill-starred boy never had a steady drill in anything.  He never remained longer at any one school than a year, and he learned at school very little that he needed most to know.  In the course of his desultory schooling he picked up some Latin, a little Greek, a good deal of French, and an inconceivable medley of odds and ends of knowledge, which his wonderful memory enabled him to use sometimes with startling effect.

Everywhere else, in the whole world, children are taught that virtue is self-control.  In the Southern States, among these tobacco-lords, boys learned just the opposite lesson,—­that virtue is self-indulgence.  This particular youth, thin-skinned, full of talent, fire, and passion, the heir to a large estate, fatherless, would have been in danger anywhere of growing up untrained,—­a wild beast in broadcloth.  In the Virginia of that day, in the circle in which he lived, there was nothing for him in the way either of curb or spur.  He did what he pleased, and nothing else.  All that was noble in his life,—­those bursts of really fine oratory, his flashes of good sense, his occasional generosities, his hatred of debt, and his eager haste to pay it,—­all these things were due to the original excellence of his race.  In the very dregs of good wine there is flavor.  We cannot make even good vinegar out of a low quality of wine.

His gentle mother taught him all the political economy he ever took to heart.  “Johnny,” said she to him one day, when they had reached a point in their ride that commanded an extensive view,

“all this land belongs to you and your brother.  It is your father’s inheritance.  When you get to be a man, you must not sell your land:  it is the first step to ruin for a boy to part with his father’s home.  Be sure to keep it as long as you live.  Keep your land, and your land will keep you.”

There never came a time when his mind was mature and masculine enough to consider this advice.  He clung to his land as Charles Stuart clung to his prerogative.