Note 73 — A LETTER TO WILLIAM GIFFORD, ESQ.

‘I hated my profession’ (the business of a shoemaker, to which he was bound prentice) ‘with a perfect hatred.’ See Mr. Gifford’s Life of Himself prefixed to his Juvenal. He seems to have liked few things else better from that day to this. He tells us in the same work (though this is hardly what I should call being ‘a good hater’) that he did not much like his father, and was not sorry when he died. This candid and amiable personage always overflowed with ‘the milk of human kindness.’