It was the first time it had ever occurred to me, that this detestable cant of false humility might have originated out of the Heep family. I had seen the harvest, but had never thought of the seed.

“When I was quite a young boy,” said Uriah, “I got to know what ’umbleness did, and I took to it. I ate ’umble pie with an appetite. I stopped at the ’umble point of my learning, and says I, ‘Hold hard!’ When you offered to teach me Latin, I knew better. ‘People like to be above you,’ says father, ‘keep yourself down.’ I am very ’umble to the present moment, Master Copperfield, but I’ve got a little power!”

And he said all this⁠—I knew, as I saw his face in the moonlight⁠—that I might understand he was resolved to recompense himself by using his power. I had never doubted his meanness, his craft and malice; but I fully comprehended now, for the first time, what a base, unrelenting, and revengeful spirit, must have been engendered by this early, and this long, suppression.