found him sitting on the edge of her bed, pressing her hand between his. "Forgive you, Jane!" he was saying, "May God forgive him who has wrought you this, as freely as I forgive you, my first and only love!" She was now falling very weak indeed. It was plain to me she could not live over the evening. Of this her mother and Williams were likewise persuaded, and neither of them left her, but passed the time in the earnest performance of the peculiar religious forms and duties of their church. It felt like intrusion on my part to stay, so I left them, looking in every now and then. In the course of the afternoon, on entering the room I observed her gazing round her with a curious glance, as of amusement and delight mingled with surprise. "Mr. -," said she, "whose are all these pretty, smiling little children, round about the bed?" I felt at a loss what to say; of course there was no child there; but it was not so with the rapt and fanatical widow. "These," said she, "are the babes of two years old and under, that were slain by command of Herod throughout all the borders of Bethlehem. Even as one of these shall you shortly be, my own darling girl!" "How bright and beautiful they look!" murmured her daughter. There was a long pause. "Mother, dear mother, I am going away from you,-give me your hand, Williams,-Mr.-" She was gone! Slowly the dim eclipse of death came over the orbs of her celestial eyes, and her lips fell asunder. "The Lord gave and taketh away," said the widow, slowly and with difficulty getting out each syllable. Blessed be His holy name!" answered Williams, and falling forward upon the body he gave way to a paroxysm of hysteric grief like a weakly girl. Adding a fervent "Amen," I withdrew to the neighbouring side-room, which was empty, for I was ashamed to go through the ward in the state of emotion I was in. Next day a clinical lecture was delivered on her case to the pupils of the establishment, and the next her mother and Williams came, with a few friends of their religious sect, and removed her body. But she does not sleep in the quiet little churchyard at Westwater. Before they went away they gave me a bright and abundant tress of her yellow hair, then each wringing my hand warmly, they went out from the city northward, and I saw them no more. But what remains to tell? Southern's piece of business he mentioned in his letter to me proved his ruin. It was a scheme to elope with the wife of the principal partner of the Westwater company, who held through her his shares in the concern. He hoped that upon her being divorced he could marry her, and obtain with her the immense property she had brought her husband. He was, however, most lamentably foiled, and, with a broken character, deprived of his situation at Westwater. His name was immediately erased by advertisement from the books of several scientific societies of which he was a member, and he went to seek his bread in London, where I believe he draws a wretched subsistence from an obscure and filthy penny paper, of which he is editor and proprietor. Nor many years ago there arrived in London a young man of humble fortunes, but sufficiently accomplished in that school and university learning, which, by courtesy of England, passes current under the name of education. Whether the name so applied has been adopted by our ancestors in a Mephistophilic disposition to jest with things sacred, or that folks then really believed in the efficacy of the course, to make men either wiser or better, is difficult to decide; for though on the one hand, it should seem strange, that persons under no delusion on the subject should persist in training themselves and their offspring in a manner, which as Petronius Arbiter long ago declared of the education of Rome, only made its subjects the greater fools,* so on the other, is it difficult to conceive how the professors could have comprehended the truth, and contemplated the grossness of the trick they were practising on the simple, and yet have kept the gravity of their countenance, undisturbed by any inclination to laugh in the face of parents and of legislators. Leaving that episode however by the wayside, we have only to remark that this young man, having nothing to trust to but the exercise of his wits for keeping life and soul together, discovered, ere his acquaintance with London had been of a very long standing, that for all purposes of eating and of drinking, his education was yet to begin. What added materially to the difficulty of this rather unpleasant position, was, that the youth had, by the simple good principle of his parents (for we hesitate under the circumstances, in ascribing the fact to good sense) been brought up with a decided respect for the difference between meum and tuum, and was moreover of that enthusiastic temper of mind, that plunges men into a wild-goose chase after the good and the beautiful (or, to use his own language, of the To Kalov and the To TρETOV). Totally ignorant of that great aphorism of modern ethics, which teaches that there are men too poor to afford keeping a conscience of their own, and having no experience of how very insufficient a fence against the "winter's flaw" virtue makes, when adopted vice a good greatcoat, he still clung to the idea of wrapping himself in its folds "in the worst of times;" and when particularly excited, he would talk rather magnificently of the vitam impendere vero,—which at that time was freely translated in England, getting hanged for high treason. Fortunately for himself, this was a consummation which, however devoutly to be wished as a martyrdom or apotheosis, was not to be obtained à point nommé; and in the mean time, it was necessary for even the most idealized and refined of speculative philosophers to "live by bread." Now every one knows that at all times the literary market of England is considerably overstocked, and that the supply of learning very much exceeds the ordinary demand in that department too, as in all other means of advancement, the first step is the greatest *Adolescentulos existimo in scholis stultissimos fieri. April.-VOL. LXIV. NO. CCLVI. 2 I difficulty: our student accordingly found that there was every prospect of the requisite knowledge of "the trade" and its ways becoming parcel of that sera sapientia, which arrives the day after the fair; and he felt that there was nothing absolutely incomprehensible in the proposition, of the steed starving while the grass grew. Had the poor fellow brought to the great metropolis a goodly stock of absolute ignorance, his chances would not have been so hostile; for not only are there many situations expressly fitted for those so circumstanced, but there are many more, in which learning of any sort is a positive impediment. To make, if not a respectable figure, at least a decent livelihood, as a shoeblack or a lamplighter, a man requires no learning; whether he can or cannot read and write, is a matter of mere indifference; but there are professions equally cleanly and equally well paid, in which book-learning is an absolute hindrance, and in which Homer and Virgil must be heaved overboard, before the vessel can be got afloat and fairly under way. This, it will be admitted, is a lesson hard to learn. It is not easy for the man of letters to admit to himself, that all he has passed so many of his best years in learning, is absolutely worthless; that cutting blocks with razors, and not even obtaining cold mutton for one's pains, is a possible contingency. Much more painful still it is, when arrived at this saving knowledge, to part for ever with the friendly muses, to contentedly resign all those pleasures which taste and genius can bestow, and to plunge headlong into the littlenesses and impertinencies forming that tide in human affairs, which Shakspere tells us, when "taken at the flood leads on to fortune." Many and many a time, in his table-talk with Duke Humphrey, did this young man ask that President of the greatest of temperance societies the question, which he had picked up in Juvenal-Quid Romæ faciam?—what the devil had brought him to London, where "esse quam videri" was totally inapplicable-where the savoir was at a discount, and the savoir faire your only road to the baker's shop. What Duke Humphrey was wont to say, by way of reply to such questioning, has never come to our knowledge; but whatever it may have been, it seems to have led his guest to the conclusion, that he had been somewhat of a fool in taking so unadvised a journey. We will not distress our readers, by detailing the many applications for employment our learned Theban had made, and made in vain : neither will we harass them by recounting the privations he suffered― the quantity of vache enragée which he would have been contented to swallow, could he have got it, or enumerate the miserable rebuffs and insults which the unworthy heaped on his head, in his patient search after a morsel of bread. Suffice it that luck stood his friend, that he did not drop down dead in the street with absolute inanition, nor was he even taken on a stretcher to the workhouse door, to be remanded to the magistrate's office. He had, however, far advanced towards the dignity of a newspaper paragraph to that effect, when, by the friendly intervention of a French usher, whom chance threw in his way, he was taken into the service of one of those umbratici doctores, those suburban dealers in timber* and short commons, who profess to teach all things teachable,--with the aid of "assistants." * "Timber and fruit ;" Hibernicé for "birch brooms and potatoes." In adopting this phraseology of "taken into the service," we do not mean to insinuate that he received a stipend equal to that of my lord's valet or his tiger, no, not even as much as is given to a groceress's teaboy, or a curatess's page; we were led to the expression by a simple reference to the services required, and the distance at which he was kept by his employer; in both which particulars, the maid of all-work, and the helper in the house, garden, and stable, had a better place of it. It is a pleasant position that of a school usher! Frowned on by the master, starved by the mistress, pelted by the boys, and hated by his brother menials of the kitchen. The head of the particular polite seminary for young blackguards, which adopted our hero, was a blockhead and an ignoramus; and the inexperienced youth wanted the vous to conceal his knowledge of the fact; so he was detested and feared accordingly in the parlour, while in the schoolroom he was the victim of a thousand petty schemes of annoyance, because he would not screen delinquency and encourage idleness: still, however, he continued to hang on, in a patient expectation of better days; till the bankruptcy of his principal once more cast him loose, with the world all before him where to choose, and his quarter's salary at the discretion of the assig nees. * In that latitude of choice which Milton has assigned to his deuteragonist on quitting Paradise, there is this inconvenience, that it resembles the comprehensiveness of verbal abstractions-the wider its range, the less it contains; the more it embraces, the fewer are the grounds for preference. The world indeed was before him, according to Horne Tooke's famous aphorism concerning the door of the London tavern; but the places at nature's feast were all reserved for the capitalists; and even Lazarus's right to the receipt of its crumbs was a vested privilege, not to be invaded with impunity by the stranger. To judge from appearances, newspapers at this time were more than usually supplied with their army of reporters; the penny-a-liners were superabundant, and ransacked the town at half price; Sir Robert would have said that the novelists of fashion were overdoing the market; for they were reduced by a foolish competition, to pay their publishers for liberty to appear in print; and the quack doctors had become so highly educated that they were able to write their own puffs. Nay, the very promotion to Shakspere's part of "Wall"the walking about the streets between two boards, a living advertisement (that lowest department of useful knowledge)—was bespoke, and not to be had for asking. If these intellectual paths to a crust were too crowded, much worse was it with that more mechanical branch of literature which is occupied by clerks, amanuenses, and lawyer's copyists. Worse it was in one sense, but better in another; for the pressure from without was there so great, that chance was wholly banished from the affair. Those who got employment stuck to it; those who failed left the field in despair, and there an end. Not so with the skilled labourers of literature: employment with them is at once precarious and varied. It is a perpetual lottery, in which every day may produce something. The unoccupied of to-day may be the * We all know who was the protagonist of the "Paradise Lost.” employed of to-morrow; and a man may thus go on living and starving alternately, through a succession of fasts and festivals as continuous as that of the Papal calendar, till he sinks at last and dies brokenhearted in the workhouse. It is an established opinion among moralists, that rope-dancing and moral refinement are very nearly incompatibles; and this intellectual rope-dancing especially, this jumping and skipping, because one cannot walk,-is assuredly anything but favourable to a moral steadiness. It is not, therefore, to be presumed that during a long period, which the hero of our tale passed in struggling for existence, in such an arena, (now writing for booksellers, now doing a leader for a newspaper, now teaching a little Greek, a little mathematics, now putting the novel of some woman of fashion into marching order, or conferring grammar, spelling, and classical allusions on a tradesman's advertisement), he could have been always quite satisfied with the moral fitness of his employment, or that all his multifarious offices were in strict accordance with those of Tully. No matter how great, how good, or how wise a man may be, he must still pay his tribute to the weakness of the age and country in which his lot is cast; how much more those, quorum virtutibus obstat res angusta domi. Still on the whole, the domestic teaching and example he had received in boyhood, was not lost on him; and his love and respect for truth and honesty remained, theoretically at least, sound and pure. But our reflections, however profound or luminous, are beginning to overload our page, and we must proceed with our narrative. Not but that this discursive mode of treating human life is quite as available in the matter-of-fact department of fictitious narrative, as in that ideal branch of composition, which is called history: nor do we see any good reason why the author may not help his reader to an idea, as freely in the one case, as in the other. For our own parts, we confess that our readers might have gone to their graves in ignorance of these mischances of the Musa Aplutæ, for ought we care, had it not been for the little bits of recondite wisdom which strewed the path, and offered themselves to be picked up, polished, and set in the narrative, for the world's edification. It happened, then (we do not exactly know the precise time), that amongst his other " literary avocations," our young friend stumbled one fine morning upon the correction of the press for a country clergyman, of a school edition of a Greek play; and the ability displayed in this humble, but laborious and somewhat critical office, procured for him the favourable notice of the publisher, and brought him into a steady employment, with a scale of remuneration superior to any he had hitherto encountered. His connexion likewise with the author was extended to other works, and led to a personal acquaintance, which ripened into esteem and friendship. He might now, by comparison, have been called well to do in the world; but the effect of attaining to an elevated point of view, is only to extend the field of vision. Accordingly, we find our friend mounted on his new stage, telescope in hand, regarding with attention the learned professions, and snatching astronomical glimpses at the judgeships, deaneries, speakerships, primacies, seats on the treasury-bench, and we know not how many other asterisms or constellations, which glorify the heaven of heavens of professional suc |