How amid all that love of inferior company, which
never to the last forsook him, did he keep his genius so free from every
touch of vulgarity?"
We answer that it was owing to the innate purity and goodness of his
nature; there was nothing in it that assimilated to vice and vulgarity.
Though his circumstances often compelled him to associate with the poor,
they never could betray him into companionship with the depraved. His
relish for humor and for the study of character, as we have before
observed, brought him often into convivial company of a vulgar kind; but he
discriminated between their vulgarity and their amusing qualities, or
rather wrought from the whole those familiar features of life which form
the staple of his most popular writings.
Much, too, of this intact purity of heart may be ascribed to the lessons of
his infancy under the paternal roof; to the gentle, benevolent, elevated,
unworldly maxims of his father, who "passing rich with forty pounds a
year," infused a spirit into his child which riches could not deprave nor
poverty degrade. Much of his boyhood, too, had been passed in the household
of his uncle, the amiable and generous Contarine; where he talked of
literature with the good pastor, and practiced music with his daughter, and
delighted them both by his juvenile attempts at poetry.
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