Herbert-of-Cherbury posture, turning over a pocket-edition of his
favorite author.

"But the solitudes of Charnwood were not destined always to obscure the
path of our young hero. The premature death of Mrs. Sittingbourn, at the
age of seventy, occasioned by incautious burning of a pot of charcoal in
her sleeping-chamber, left him in his nineteenth year nearly without
resources. That the stage at all should have presented itself as an
eligible scope for his talents, and, in particular, that he should have
chosen a line so foreign to what appears to have been his turn of mind,
may require some explanation.

"At Charnwood, then, we behold him thoughtful, grave, ascetic. From his
cradle averse to flesh-meats and strong drink; abstemious even beyond
the genius of the place, and almost in spite of the remonstrances of his
great-aunt, who, though strict, was not rigid; water was his habitual
drink, and his food little beyond the mast and beech-nuts of his
favorite groves. It is a medical fact, that this kind of diet, however
favorable to the contemplative powers of the primitive hermits, etc., is
but ill adapted to the less robust minds and bodies of a later
generation. Hypochondria almost constantly ensues. It was so in the case
of the young Liston. He was subject to sights, and had visions. Those
arid beech-nuts, distilled by a complexion naturally adust, mounted into
an occiput already prepared to kindle by long seclusion and the fervor
of strict Calvinistic notions. In the glooms of Charnwood he was
assailed by illusions similar in kind to those which are related of the
famous Anthony of Padua. Wild antic faces would ever and anon protrude
themselves upon his sensorium. Whether he shut his eyes or kept them
open, the same illusions operated. The darker and more profound were his
cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions.