Page:Father's memoirs of his child.djvu/229

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and young, the healthy and infirm, are without exemption and alike exposed. Had this fatal accident not occurred, with so happy a temperament of mind and constitution, with a body robust and well proportioned, there was, up to the time of almost his only illness, at least the usual probability of his arriving at manhood. What that manhood might have been, it is now fruitless to conjecture, and would perhaps be only painful to know, were the knowledge of what we have lost within our grasp. At the same time, we may unpresumingly ground on our experience of his infancy the belief, that whether he had devoted his studies, in after-life, to the fine arts, to elegant literature, or to the discovery and exemplification of the higher truths and severer sciences, he might have done some honour to his age and country; not by ranking high among its artificial orders, but by useful labours, and by the contributions of patriotism and talent to the ge-