William Dove was Daniel's only surviving brother, seven years his junior. He was born with one of those heads in which the thin partition that divides great wits from folly is wanting. Had he come into the world a century sooner, he would have been taken _nolens volens_ into some Baron's household, to wear motley, make sport for the guests and domestics, and live in fear of the rod. But it was his better fortune to live in an age when this calamity rendered him liable to no such oppression, and to be precisely in that station which secured for him all the enjoyments of which he was capable, and all the care he needed. In higher life, he would probably have been consigned to the keeping of strangers who would have taken charge of him for pay; in a humbler degree he must have depended upon the parish for support; or have been made an inmate of one of those moral lazar-houses in which age and infancy, the harlot and the idiot, the profligate and the unfortunate are herded together. William Dove escaped these aggravations of calamity. He escaped also that persecution to which he would have been exposed in populous places where boys run loose in packs, and harden one another in impudence, mischief and cruelty. Natural feeling, when natural feeling is not corrupted, leads men to regard persons in his condition with a compassion not unmixed with awe. It is common with the country people when they speak of such persons to point significantly at the head and say _'tis not all there_;—words denoting a sense of the mysteriousness of our nature which perhaps they feel more deeply on this than on any other occasion. No outward and visible deformity can make them so truly apprehend how fearfully and wonderfully we are made. William Dove's was not a case of fatuity. Though _all_ was not there, there was a great deal. He was what is called _half-saved_. Some of his faculties were more than ordinarily acute, but the power of self conduct was entirely wanting in him. Fortunately it was supplied by a sense of entire dependence which produced entire docility. A dog does not obey his master more dutifully than William obeyed his brother; and in this obedience there was nothing of fear; with all the strength and simplicity of a child's love, it had also the character and merit of a moral attachment.