University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
The Reader is introduced to a bashful young Gentleman!

Sybrandt Westbrook was the only son of a
distant female kinswoman of the Vancour family;
once, it was supposed, a great favourite of Mr.
Dennis, who had been suspected of something
more than a mere liking to the lady. She was a
beauty and an heiress, and married a British officer
at New-York, who dissipated her fortune, and finally
went home and never returned. She left an only
son, without fortune, or a protector to his infancy.
But he found one in Mr. Dennis Vancour, who,
after the death of his wife, took the boy home,
adopted him as his son, and superintended his education.
Dennis was a worthy man, with a vast
many peculiarities. He cherished the old primitive
Dutch manners, and above all the old primitive.
Dutch language, the only one he could now ever be
brought to speak, although master of English. He
had a great distaste for New-York names, modes,
and follies; and ever since he was cut out by a red
coat, cherished a mortal antipathy to every man who
wore that livery. He disliked the new system of education
daily gaining ground in the province, and the
thousand innovations which its change of masters had
introduced. The fashionable young men were coxcombs,
and the fashionable young women only fit to
dance, flirt, and make fools of themselves with the
red coats.

For these and divers other substantial reasons, he
determined that his adopted son should receive a domestic
education, under the care of the good Dominie
Stettinius, pastor of the congregation. The dominie
was a stanch pillar of the Reformed Dutch
church, a profound scholar, and a man of great piety
as well as simplicity of character. He was bred at the
famous university of Leyden; that renowned seminary,
where Erasmus, Grotius, Grævius, and a thousand
other illustrious scholars were educated; and where
Scaliger, Salmasius, and a thousand illustrious masters
presided from time to time. It was at Leyden,
in the United Republics of Holland, that scholars
sought refuge from monkish bigotry, that the liberty
of thought, speech, and writing, maintained itself
against the persecutions of church and state; and it
was there that the greatest, the most indefatigable,
and the most useful scholars that perhaps the world
ever knew were protected as well as rewarded for
their labours in the cause of learning and liberal
opinions. The rival nations of France, Italy, and
England have sought to monopolize the glories of
learning, science, and philosophy; but if we resort to
history and fact, we shall find that the civilized world
is at least equally indebted to the Free States of
Holland, and that at one period, comprising a century
or more, had they not found a refuge there, they would
in all probability have been persecuted into silence,
if not unto death.

Dominie Stettinius had been a laborious student, and
was now a ripe scholar. This was some distinction
in those days, when it required the labours of years
to collect that knowledge which was then dispersed
among thousands of bulky volumes, but is now collected
and condensed in encyclopedias, dictionaries,

and compendiums of various kinds. But the dominie
was only a scholar and a pious divine; he possessed
no one accomplishment except learning, nor
had he a respect for any other; his manners were
simple, almost rustic; and such was the sobriety of
his notions, that, though a kind-hearted being as ever
existed, he could hardly tolerate the smiles, the
gayety, and the gambols of happy childhood.

This worthy divine, by desire of Mr. Dennis Vancour,
took the entire charge of Sybrandt, at the age
of seven years, and made a great scholar of him at
nineteen. The good man was so zealous in plying
him with books that he forgot men, and above all,
women, who are as necessary to the formation of
mind and manners as they are to the creation of the
man himself. The consequence was, that the youth
grew up a shy, awkward, reserved, abstract being,
without the vivacity of his age, and ignorant as a
child of that knowledge of the world which, like
small change, is essential to the every day transactions
of life. There was nothing on the face of the
earth he was so much afraid of as a woman, particularly
a young woman, whose very presence seemed
to turn him into stone, and lock up the springs of
thought as well as action. But notwithstanding all
this, woman was the divinity of his soul, worshipped
in secret in his rural walks and solitary contemplations.
Some ideal mistress of his own creation was
ever present to his imagination, and the propensity
to love, which is the universal characteristic of
youth, only became the more intense from his entire
abstraction from the will and the means of its gratification.
Thus, while from a consciousness of his
awkwardness and embarrassment, he shunned all
personal communion with woman, his whole soul was

filled and animated by a latent smothered fire, a
sleeping Cupid, which, when once roused into action
by opportunity and an object, was destined to become
the ruling influence of his life.

The person and aspect of Sybrandt were eminently
handsome; but his manners and address deplorably
rustic and ungainly. When addressed abruptly, his
awkward embarrassment had the appearance of stupidity;
and such were his habits of abstraction that
he often gave the most silly answers imaginable.
Thus he grew up with little to recommend him to the
respect or affection of his fellow-creatures around
but a sort of harmless stupidity, which the good
dominie was pleased to call the gravity of wisdom.
His vivacity, if nature had ever given him any, was
entirely repressed by hard studies, want of company,
and relaxation, reinforced by the stern gravity
of the worthy Stettinius, who plied him with tasks day
and night. His shoulders had become rounded like
those of advancing decrepitude, and he had acquired
a habit of stooping which destroyed the manliness
and dignity of his figure.

With him, the happy days of childhood had been
the season of perpetual toil. While he saw from the
window of his scholastic prison the little urchins of
the neighbourhood sporting in the meadows, or on
the white sandy river-beach, and heard their shrill
shouts of unchecked vivacity, nature would yearn in
his heart to partake in the frolic which she herself
had provided for the little sons and daughters of men.
But every glance from the everlasting book of tasks
was watched and checked by the good dominie, who
had long outlived the recollection of his youthful feelings,
and buried every impulse of nature under the
mighty mass of scholastic rubbish, which the incessant

labours of threescore years had concentrated in
his memory. Assuredly learning is a thing of almost
inestimable value; but still I doubt it may be bought
too dearly. Why should the season of childhood,
which God and nature have ordained to be a period of
freedom from cares and toils, be converted into one
of labour and anxiety, for the sake of a little premature
knowledge, which the early and tender intellect
is unable to comprehend, or the comprehension of
which requires an effort of the mind which stints its
growth for ever afterward? Knowledge should only
keep pace with the natural growth of the human
faculties. If it comes to exceed the powers of the
mind, and to be too great for the grasp of our reason
and judgment, the overburthened intellect becomes
but an ass, laden with treasures of no use to the bearer,
and only calculated to oppress the wholesome vigour
and vivacity of nature. When I see a little urchin,
who ought to be enjoying nature's holyday, and
strengthening his constitution by wholesome exercise
to bear the vicissitudes of the world in after-times,
kidnapped and sent to school, to sit on a bench for
four or five hours together, employed in learning by
rote what he is unable to comprehend, I cannot help
contemplating him as the slave and the victim of the
vanity of the parent and the folly of the teacher.
Such a system is only calculated to lay a foundation
for disease and decrepitude, to stint the physical
and intellectual growth, and to produce a premature
old age of body and mind.

Sybrandt had seen but little of his cousin Catalina,
as their relationship was denominated, previous to
her being sent to the boarding-school; and less of
her from that time. True, the young lady spent her
vacations at home, but Sybrandt was either too hard

at his studies, or too bashful to be much in her company.
When this happened, he was pretty certain
to be more than commonly stupid and embarrassed,
so that Catalina had long set him down as little better
than a sleepy country bumpkin of the first pretensions.
The youth had anticipated her arrival and final sojourning
at her father's mansion, as an event of great
interest to him. True, he felt convinced in his own
mind, that he should never dare to look her full in
the face, or enjoy either ease or pleasure in her society.
Yet still her abode so near him would furnish
a new and charming object for his abstract devoirs
and solitary contemplations. She would become the
ideal companion of his rambles; the bright vision of
his imagination, and give a zest to his existence in
that visionary world which furnished almost all the
materials of his happiness. He was excessively
anxious to see her, and punctual in his attendance at
the mansion house while the storm lasted and there
was no immediate prospect of the young lady's arrival;
but the moment the “Patroon” came in sight
his heart failed him, and he retreated into the fields,
there to enjoy an imaginary meeting which he dared
not encounter in reality. He embraced his cousin;
kissed her cheek; made the most gallant, eloquent
speeches; gazed in her face with eager eyes of admiration;
and, in short, enjoyed in imagination a
scene exactly opposite to that which the reality would
have presented. Happy, thrice happy is the man
who can thus create a paradise around him, and
spin his enjoyments, as it were, from his own materials.
This is a species of domestic manufacture
that certainly ought to be encouraged by the government.

Mr. Dennis Vancour was somewhat indignant at

the ignominious retreat of Sybrandt, to whom he delivered
a Dutch lecture at their next interview, on
his sheepishness. The good man took especial care
not to recollect that it was, in a great measure, owing
to the system of education inflicted upon him by
the dominie, with his entire approbation. He insisted
on his accompanying him, the next morning,
to pay his devoirs to the young lady; and accordingly
an interview took place between them. On the part
of Sybrandt it was shy and embarrassed, a mixture
of pride and timidity; on that of Catalina, sprightly
and good-humoured, with a sly expression of slighting
superiority, which to one of his quick feelings
was calculated to increase his embarrassment, and
make him appear still more awkward and stupid.
The noisy, but well-meaning Ariel, made matters
still worse, by occasionally urging the young man to
“buck up,” as he called it, to the young lady, and
show his breeding. Poor Sybrandt wished himself
a thousand miles away. By the time dinner was
served, his head felt like a great bag of wool, and
his heart ached with an oppressive load of imaginary
contempt and ridicule, which he thought he saw in
the eyes of every one, more especially those of Catalina.
Ariel, who sat next him was perpetually
jogging him in the side, to offer some civility to the
young lady, and at length wrought him up to the hardihood
of asking her to take a glass of wine, which
he did in a voice so low that nobody heard him.

“Try again,” whispered Ariel; “zounds! man, you
could not hear yourself, I am sure.”

Sybrandt tried again, but his voice died away in
murmurs. Ariel was out of patience. “A-hem!”
roared he in a voice that made Sybrandt quake.—
“Ahem!—Catalina, your cousin asks you to drink

wine with him.” The glasses were filled, but unfortunately
Ariel, who was none of the smallest, sat
directly between the young people and intercepted Sybrandt's
view of his cousin. When Sybrandt leaned
forward to catch the lady's eye, Ariel did the like,
from an inherent sympathy with motion, originating
in his inveterate antipathy to sitting still; and thus
they continued bobbing backwards and forwards till
Catalina could restrain herself no longer, and laughed
outright. Habits and dispositions like those of Sybrandt
never fail to take the laugh and the ridicule
all to themselves, even when they are only parties
concerned. The young man actually perspired with
agony, and when at length he gained an opportunity
of bowing to the lady, his nerves were in such a state
of agitation that he was incapable of swallowing.
The wine took the wrong way, and nearly suffocated
the luckless lad, who was only relieved by an ungovernable
fit of coughing, during which he precipitated
his draught in the face of honest Ariel.

“Blitzen!” exclaimed Dennis, in an under tone;
for he was extremely anxious his adopted son should
do credit to his education.

“A-hem! zounds!” cried Ariel, wiping his eyes,
“why, Sybrandt, one would think you mistook it for
a dose of physic.” The young lady exchanged a significant
smile with her mother, and the good Egbert,
according to his custom, said nothing.

The dinner passed off without any other catastrophe,
though poor Sybrant trembled to his very
heart-strings, and shuddered when he put any thing
into his mouth, lest it might go the wrong way.
He escaped as soon as possible, and sought his usual
communion with his friend and counsellor, solitude.
Here his imagination revelled in tortures of its own

creation, and painted in the most exaggerated colours
the scenes that had just occurred. Under the Doric
roughness and simplicity of his appearance and manners,
this young man concealed a proud sensibility,
that withered under the sense of ridicule and contempt.
The very thought, the very shadow of a
thought, that he had been the object of either, stung
him with a feeling of self-abasement, of keen-cutting
mortification, that brought drops of agony from his
heart and wrung the perspiration from his aching forehead.
Such a temper aggravates the slightest matters
into stings and nettles; with a watchful, anxious
solicitude, it lies in wait for poisons to nourish its own
infirmity, and makes its own keen sensibilities to the
merest trifles the measure of the feelings of others.
In five minutes after Sybrandt's departure from the
mansion-house, every circumstance connected with
his mortifications was entirely forgotten by all but
himself. But the recollection continued to rankle in
his mind for a long while afterward, rendering him,
if possible, a thousand times more shy, apprehensive,
and sensitive than before. He never entered the
old mansion that the scene of the dinner-table did
not present itself with accumulated circumstances of
mortification, paralyzing his gayety, oppressing his
understanding, and giving to his actions a degree of
awkward restraint that made his company painful
as well as irksome to Catalina. It was indeed but
seldom that he could be induced to seek her society,
though she was ever the companion of his solitude;
the theme of a thousand airy visions of the future,
which he indulged without the remotest idea, or even
wish to realize. He lived upon his own imaginings,
of which, though self was always the centre, the circumference
comprehended the universe. The influence
of solitude on the selfish principle is almost
omnipotent. He who lives to himself, and by himself,
becomes as it were, the object of his own idolatry.
Having little to draw off his attention from
himself alone, the claims, the actions, the desires, the
happiness of his fellow-creatures never intrude, or if
they intrude at all, it is as mere auxiliaries, or obstacles
to his supreme dominion. Upon him the social
feeling, which is the source of a thousand virtues,
never operates, except perhaps in some imaginary
revery that calls up a momentary impulse of kindness
or humanity, which dies away without ever being
imbodied into action. He lives and moves, and
has his being, his enjoyments, his regrets, and disappointments
concentrated in himself alone.

Sybrandt was an example of these truths. His
principles were all good, and he practised no vices.
Yet neither his talents nor his virtues were ever
brought into exercise in a communion with his
fellow-beings, because his pride, timidity, and sensitiveness
drove him continually from society, to nourish
the perpetual contemplation of self, by pondering
on the ridicule and contempt which was ever
present to his imagination. Thus all his acquirements
and all his good qualities lay dormant, amid
the violent action of feelings and considerations
that were exclusively selfish. It remained to be
seen what such a being might or would become
when placed in conflict with his fellows, under the
incitements and temptations of the world.