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expand1997 (1)
1Author:  Calvert George Henry 1803-1889Add
 Title:  A Volume from the Life of Herbert Barclay  
 Published:  1997 
 Subjects:  University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | University of Virginia Library, Early American Fiction, 1789-1875 | UVA-LIB-EarlyAmFict1789-1875 
 Description: “Do you recollect when you were last with us, you asked me, on occasion of my describing some of the scenes of my youthful days, to give you a chapter from my early life? If you have forgotten your request and my promise to comply with it, the accompanying manuscript will remind you of both, and at the same time of the proverb—“Give him an inch and he will take an ell.” A short time after you left us, I one day got Alfred to make me some good pens, and taking a sheet of his large school paper, that I might have “room and verge enough,” I sat down to fulfil my promise. I soon found myself at the end of the sheet with my chapter unfinished, and 1* what I had written appearing to me very meager. The effort, however, created an interest in the occupation. Half-buried recollections with their trains of association rose up. The motives of pleasure and curiosity added themselves to the simple purpose of keeping my word to you. The design of enveloping fact in fiction grew out of them. I resolved to give you half a dozen chapters instead of one; and here you have the result of this resolve in the form of a volume—and an exemplification of the growth of great things out of small. When I tell you, that the task of writing it has afforded me much pleasure, I know I furnish you with a motive to bear patiently the task of reading it. My wife, too, has been highly amused with the productions of “my book,” as she calls it. She has indeed contributed to it. The proper names are all testimonials of her genius for fiction. She claims to have supplied, besides, useful hints, and even to have made several important corrections: most of these claims, however, are questionable. You will be wrong if you ascribe to her any portion of my character. I alone am answerable for the liberties which in that picture fiction has taken with fact. Whatever difficulty you may have in discerning the proportions in which they are mingled, you will have none when I tell you that you have a sincere friend in “P. S. How soon shall we see you again in this part of Maryland? Alfred asks often when you are coming back. His partiality for you is owing chiefly, I believe, to his triumphs over you in geography.” —“Had I observed that Herbert's natural dispositions exposed him to be particularly injured by pursuing this course, I should not have permitted him to pursue it. Respect for his father's injunctions would have yielded to regard for his welfare. Indeed, in disregarding such injunctions from such a motive, I should have felt, that I was doing a duty towards my brother himself, as well as towards my nephew. But Herbert, has, I think, lost less by the imperfections of education, than most young persons lose. He has run smoothly over the customary course, learning the little that can be learnt in it, with such readiness, that acquisition has not been to him an irksome labor, nor absence from his teachers, liberation from prison. He has none of the disgust for study, which is so often the strongest impression brought away from school. Besides, with the will and opportunity, a young man of twenty can, in a great measure, make up for early deficiencies.”
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