knew that with some branches of learning I was more conversant than
himself, yet, as my emulation had been hitherto solely directed to
bodily contention, I had never thought of contesting with him a
reputation for which I cared little, and on a point in which I had been
early taught that I could never hope to enter into any advantageous
comparison with the "genius" of the Devereuxs.

A new spirit now passed into me: I examined myself with a jealous and
impartial scrutiny; I weighed my acquisitions against those of my
brother; I called forth, from their secret recesses, the unexercised and
almost unknown stores I had from time to time laid up in my mental
armoury to moulder and to rust. I surveyed them with a feeling that
they might yet be polished into use; and, excited alike by the stimulus
of affection on one side and hatred on the other, my mind worked itself
from despondency into doubt, and from doubt into the sanguineness of
hope. I told none of my design; I exacted from my uncle a promise not
to betray it; I shut myself in my room; I gave out that I was ill; I saw
no one, not even the Abbe; I rejected his instructions, for I looked
upon him as an enemy; and, for the two months before my trial, I spent
night and day in an unrelaxing application, of which, till then, I had
not imagined myself capable.

Though inattentive to the school exercises, I had never been wholly
idle. I was a lover of abstruser researches than the hackneyed subjects
of the school, and we had really received such extensive and judicious
instructions from the Abbe during our early years that it would have
been scarcely possible for any of us to have fallen into a thorough
distaste for intellectual pursuits. In the examination I foresaw that
much which I had previously acquired might be profitably
displayed,--much secret and recondite knowledge of the customs and