At thirteen Fitzjames Stephen[39] roused himself to thrash a big boy who had long bullied him, and became a fighter. In his sixteenth year, he grew nearly five inches, but was so shy and timid at Eton that he says, "I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys"; but in the reaction to the long abuse his mind was steeled against oppression, tyranny, and every kind of unfairness. He read Paine's "Age of Reason," and went "through the Bible as a man might go through a wood, cutting down trees. The priests can stick them in again, but they will not make them grow."
Dickens has given us some interesting adolescents. Miss Dingwall in "Sketches by Boz," "very sentimental and romantic"; the tempery young Nickleby, who, at nineteen, thrashed Squeers; Barnaby Rudge, idiotic and very muscular; Joe Willet, persistently treated as a boy till he ran away to join the army and married Dolly Varden, perhaps the most exuberant, good-humored, and beautiful girl in all the Dickens gallery; Martin Chuzzlewit, who also ran away, as did David Copperfield, perhaps the most true to adolescence because largely reminiscent of the author's own life; Steerforth, a stranger from home, and his victim, Little Emily; and to some extent Sam Weller, Dick Swiveller, the Marchioness, young Podsnap, the Artful Dodger, and Charley Bates; while Oliver Twist, Little Nell, and Little Dorrit, Joe and Turveydrop in Bleak House, and Paul Dombey, young as they were, show the beginning of the pubescent change. Most of his characters, however, are so overdrawn and caricatured as to be hardly true to life.[40]
In the "Romance of John Inglesant,"[41] by J. H. Shorthouse, we have a remarkable picture of an unusually gifted youth, who played an important rôle in the days of Cromwell and King Charles, and who was long poised in soul between the Church of Rome and the English party. He was very susceptible to the fascination of superstition, romance, and day-dreaming, and at eleven absorbed his master's Rosicrucian theories of spiritual existence where spirits held converse with each other and with mankind. A mystic Platonism, which taught that Pindar's story of the Argo was only a recipe for the philosopher's stone, fascinated him at fourteen. The philosophy of obedience and of the subjection of reason to authority was early taught him, and he sought to live from within, hearing only the divine law, as the worshipers of Cybele heard only the flutes. His twin brother Eustace was an active worldling, and soon he followed him to court as page to the Queen, but delighted more and more in wandering apart and building air castles. For a time he was entirely swayed, and his life directed, by a Jesuit Father, who taught him the crucifix and the rosary. At sixteen the doctrine of divine illumination fascinated him. He struggled to find the path of true devotion; abandoned himself to extremely ritualistic forms of worship; dabbled a little in alchemy and astrology to help develop the divine nature within him and to attain the beatific vision. Soon he was introduced to the "Protestant nunnery," as it was called, where the venerable Mr. Ferran, a friend of George Herbert's, was greatly taken by Inglesant's accomplishments and grace of manner. Various forms of extremely High Church yet Protestant worship were celebrated here each day with great devotion, until he became disgusted with Puritanism and craved to participate in the office of mass. At this point, however, he met Mr. Hobbes, whose rude but forcible condemnation of papacy restrained him from casting his lot with it. At seventeen, he saw one night a real apparition of the just executed Strafford. The last act of his youth, which we can note here, was soon after he was twenty, when he fell in love with the charming and saintly Mary Collet. The rough Puritan Thorne had made her proposals at which she revolted, but she and Inglesant confessed love to each other; she saw, however, that they had a way of life marked out for themselves by an inner impulse and light. This calling they must follow and abandon love, and now John plunged into the war on the side of the King.