Not that like
Sackville or Hawkins, he had a ball at every leisure moment in his
hand; but, preferably to fives or cricket, he would amuse himself in
mechanical pursuits; little in themselves, but great as to what they
might have been convertible.
In the fourth form, he produced a red shoe of his own making. And though
he never made a pocket watch, and probably might mar many, yet all the
interior machinery he knew and could name. The whole movement he took to
pieces, and replaced.
The man who is to find out the longitude, cannot have beginnings; better
than these. Count Bruhl, since Madge's death, the best watch-maker of
his time, did not raise more early wonder.
Besides this, Hamilton was to be found in every daring oddity. Lords
Burlington and Kent, in all their rage for porticos, were nothing to him
in a rage for pediments.
For often has the morning caught him scaling the high pediments of the
school-door, and at peril of Ins life clambering down, opening the door
within, before the boy who kept the gate could come with the key. His
evenings set upon no less perils; in pranks with gunpowder; in leaping
from unusual heights into the ~82~~Thames. As a practical geographer
of London, and Heaven only knows how many miles round it, omniscient
Jackson himself could not know more.
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