Turbulent and lawless, he
bitterly resented the intolerable restraint of a tranquil life, and, at
last, in the hope of a larger liberty, he enlisted for a drummer in the
Norfolk Militia, stationed at the moment in Edinburgh Castle. A brief,
insubordinate year, misspent in his country's service, proved him
hopeless of discipline: he claimed his discharge, and henceforth he was
free to follow the one craft for which nature and his own ambition had
moulded him.
Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full possession of
his talent while still a child. A Barrington of fourteen, he knew every
turn and twist of his craft, before he escaped from school. His youthful
necessities were munificently supplied by facile depredation, and the
only hindrance to immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where
he might fence his plunder. Meanwhile he painted his soul black with
wickedness. Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable conduct
of his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of Leith or the Golden
Acre. Though he knew not the seduction of whisky, he missed never a
dance nor a raffle, joining the frolics of prigs and callets in complete
forgetfulness of the shorter catechism. In vain the kirk compared him to
a 'bottle in the smoke'; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the
gallows; his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at
sixteen, he left his father's house for a sporting life, he had not his
equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.
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