42 -THE BOY. 



detached accident or effort to effect a change.' He had 

 at this time cast all religion to the winds. We have it 

 explicitly in his own words that he became an atheist. 

 ' A boy-atheist,' he writes to Mr John Swanson in 1828, 

 ' is surely an uncommon character. I was one in 

 reality; for possessed of a strong memory, which my 

 uncles and an early taste for reading, had stored with 

 religious sentiments and stories of religious men, I was 

 compelled for the sake of peace either to do that which 

 was right, or by denying the truth of the Bible to set 

 every action, good and bad, on the same level/ His 

 atheism, however, was a mere affectation a drossy 

 scum on the surface of his nature, with no real basis 

 either in head or in heart. It was one form of his 

 rebelliousness ' at the time. He was obstinately wilful 

 and irreligious, and he thought it bold and fine and 

 also logically consistent to call himself an atheist. 



Three schoolmasters in succession had an oppor- 

 tunity of exercising their talents upon Hugh, and in each 

 case the failure was signal. His schooling ended when 

 he was fifteen in a pitched battle with the dominie. 

 His gains from ten years of nominal education were 

 small. Penmanship clear and strong, a smattering of 

 arithmetic, spelling of which a boy of ten might 

 be ashamed, syntax which joined substantives in the 

 singular to verbs in the plural and vice versd, were 

 his scholastic acquirements. His miscellaneous read- 

 ing, however, had been extensive; he had stored up 

 a vast amount of information in a capacious and re- 

 tentive memory ; he composed freely in prose and verse, 

 though there is hardly any sign of vitality in his writings 

 of this period except the delight they evince in the work 

 of composition. Before the close of the day on which 

 his conflict with the schoolmaster took place, he had 



