I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast when I was going to say the catechism in the church, as was customary before Easter.[17] I remember also telling her on one week day that I had been at church, for our school stood in the churchyard, and we had frequent opportunities of seeing what was going on there.  The occasion was, a woman doing penance in the church in a white sheet.  My mother commended my having been present, expressing a hope that I should remember the circumstance for the rest of my life.  ‘But,’ said I, ’Mama, they did not give me a penny, as I had been told they would.’  ‘Oh,’ said she, recanting her praises, ’if that was your motive, you were very properly disappointed.’

My last impression was having a glimpse of her on passing the door of her bedroom during her last illness, when she was reclining in her easy chair.  An intimate friend of hers, Miss Hamilton by name, who was used to visit her at Cockermouth, told me that she once said to her, that the only one of her five children about whose future life she was anxious, was William; and he, she said, would be remarkable either for good or for evil.  The cause of this was, that I was of a stiff, moody, and violent temper; so much so that I remember going once into the attics of my grandfather’s house at Penrith, upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew was kept there.  I took the foil in hand, but my heart failed.  Upon another occasion, while I was at my grandfather’s house at Penrith, along with my eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops together in the large drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon particular occasions.  The walls were hung round with family pictures, and I said to my brother, ’Dare you strike your whip through that old lady’s petticoat?’ He replied, ‘No, I won’t.’  ‘Then,’ said I, ‘here goes;’ and I struck my lash through her hooped petticoat, for which no doubt, though I have forgotten it, I was properly punished.  But possibly, from some want of judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than otherwise.

[17] See Ecclesiastical Sonnets, Part III.  Sonnet xxii.  ’On Catechising.’

Of my earliest days at school I have little to say, but that they were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty, then and in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked.  For example, I read all Fielding’s works, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and any part of Swift that I liked; Gulliver’s Travels, and the Tale of the Tub, being both much to my taste.  I was very much indebted to one of the ushers of Hawkshead School, by name Shaw, who taught me more of Latin in a fortnight than I had learnt during two preceding years at the school of Cockermouth.  Unfortunately for me this excellent