Thus my own inkling for the Muses
had excited his entire displeasure. He assured me one day, when I
asked him for a new copy of Horace, that the translation of "Poeta
nascitur non fit" was "a nasty poet for nothing fit"- a remark which I
took in high dudgeon. His repugnance to "the humanities" had, also,
much increased of late, by an accidental bias in favor of what he
supposed to be natural science. Somebody had accosted him in the
street, mistaking him for no less a personage than Doctor Dubble L.
Dee, the lecturer upon quack physics. This set him off at a tangent;
and just at the epoch of this story- for story it is getting to be
after all- my grand-uncle Rumgudgeon was accessible and pacific only
upon points which happened to chime in with the caprioles of the hobby
he was riding. For the rest, he laughed with his arms and legs, and
his politics were stubborn and easily understood. He thought, with
Horsley, that "the people have nothing to do with the laws but to obey
them."
I had lived with the old gentleman all my life. My parents, in
dying, had bequeathed me to him as a rich legacy. I believe the old
villain loved me as his own child- nearly if not quite as well as he
loved Kate- but it was a dog's existence that he led me, after all.
From my first year until my fifth, he obliged me with very regular
floggings.
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