His schooling was not long; and while it lasted part of Henry’s time was employed in carrying his father’s deliveries of chops and rumps to the prosperous of Nottingham.  At fourteen his parents made an effort to start him in line for business by placing him in a stocking factory.  The work was wholly uncongenial, and shortly afterward he was employed in the office of a busy firm of lawyers.  He spent twelve hours a day in the office and then an hour more in the evening was put upon Latin and Greek.  Even such recreation hours as the miserable youth found were dismally employed in declining nouns and conjugating verbs.  In a little garret at the top of the house he began to collect his books; even his supper of bread and milk was carried up to him there, for he refused to eat with his family for fear of interrupting his studies.  It is a deplorable picture:  the fumes of the hearty butcher’s evening meal ascend the stair in vain, Henry is reading “Blackstone” and “The Wealth of Nations.”  If it were Udolpho or Conan Doyle that held him, there were some excuse.  The sad life of Henry is the truest indictment of overstudy that I know.  No one, after reading Southey’s memoir, will overload his brain again.

At the age of fifteen we find the boy writing to his older brother Neville:  “I have made a firm resolution never to spend above one hour at this amusement [novel reading].  I have been obliged to enter into this resolution in consequence of a vitiated taste acquired by reading romances.”  He is human enough to add, however, that “after long and fatiguing researches in ‘Blackstone’ or ‘Coke,’ ‘Tom Jones’ or ’Robinson Crusoe’ afford a pleasing and necessary relaxation.  Of ‘Robinson Crusoe’ I shall observe that it is allowed to be the best novel for youth in the English language.”

The older brother to whom these comments were addressed was living in London, apparently a fairly successful man of business.  Henry permitted himself to indulge his pedagogical and ministerial instincts for the benefit and improvement of his kinsman.  They seem to have carried on a mutual recrimination in their letters:  Neville was inclined to belittle the divine calling of poets in their teens; while Henry deplored his brother’s unwillingness to write at length and upon serious and “instructive” topics.  Alas, the ill-starred young man had a mania for self-improvement.  If our great-grandparents were all like that what an age it had been for the Scranton correspondence courses!  “What is requisite to make one’s correspondence valuable?” asks Henry.  “I answer, sound sense.” (The italics are his own.) “You have better natural abilities than many youth,” he tells his light-hearted brother, “but it is with regret I see that you will not give yourself the trouble of writing a good letter.  My friend, you never found any art, however trivial, that did not require some application at first.”  He begs the astounded Neville to fill his letters with his opinions of the books he reads.  “You have no idea how beneficial this would be to yourself.”  Does one not know immediately that Henry is destined to an early grave?