My own efforts were of little avail to combat the difficulties that I had to encounter. My father’s friends and acquaintances, remembering all my childish follies, and the greater number of them being dull, thorough-paced men of business, whose blood had glided through its icy channel in the same even current from the time they came into the world, could not believe that a warm imagination might lead a boy astray from the path of prudence, without his heart being depraved. They saw nothing in me but the blackguard boy, who had ran away from his parents; and they rung eternal cautions in my ears, accompanied by wise shakes of the head, and doubts lavishly expressed of my steadiness. They could ill dissemble the thorough contempt they had for my capacity for business: no wonder, they had all outstripped me in the necessary qualifications of chicanery and selfishness—I acted from natural impulse, and often wrong; but it was myself that suffered—they acted systematically, their eyes fixed steadily on their own interest, ready to take advantage of the follies of those around them. I speak from experience. I have found individuals who hypocritically deplored my want of wisdom, while in the act of taking advantage of my folly: while others, on the pretence of caring for my soul’s salvation, wished to embue my mind with their religious prejudices, and cramp my conscience within the narrow bounds marked out by their particular sect; and when I claimed a right to think for myself on these matters, they shunned me as a reprobate, or decried me as an infidel. I have found many things to disgust me in my passage through life; but never anything equal to the hypocritical cant of many professing sectarians. Thus, as it were, cut off from society, and my place filled up in it, I did not possess the necessary courage to force through these difficulties, and I remained in an undecided state for some time. My manners had not been framed in the world’s school, and I felt all that _mauvaise honte_ that people of a sensitive mind generally feel in such a situation, which, along with a proud feeling that caught fire at the slightest look, or word indicative of contempt, rendered my progress in the world almost a thing impossible.