How will the youth of today, with its early physical growth, lagging emotional development, and late assumption of responsibility, describe its formative years when, in the twilight of life, it sits down to write autobiography? Will it do as well as those who entered the world of men before they could shed all the garments of childhood? James Yonge was indentured at eleven, by a father who disliked him, to the surgeon of an English man-of-war in 1658. Nine years later, he began his journal.
Rotterdam. Jan. 3rd, 1967. The Providence of God having made me a prisoner to the Dutch,.... yet it being sweetened by inlargement on bayle, I began to consider how to employ the leisure God had given me. Two employments readily offered besides reading books,.... my second employment was to digest out of the rude memoirs of my common Journal... a more regular and exact narrative