certain that you
never could find a man fortunate on the turf or at the gaining-table who
had not an excellent head for figures. Well, this French is good enough,
apparently; there are but a few idioms, here and there, that, strictly
speaking, are more English than French. But the whole is a work scarce
worth paying for!"

Pisistratus.--"The work of the head fetches a price not proportioned to
the quantity, but the quality. When shall I call for this?"

Stranger.--"To-morrow." (And he puts the manuscript away in a drawer.)

We then conversed on various matters for nearly an hour; and my
impression of this young man's natural ability was confirmed and
heightened. But it was an ability as wrong and perverse in its
directions or instincts as a French novelist's. He seemed to have, to
a high degree, the harder portion of the reasoning faculty, but to be
almost wholly without that arch beautifier of character, that sweet
purifier of mere intellect,--the imagination; for though we are too much
taught to be on our guard against imagination, I hold it, with Captain
Roland, to be the divinest kind of reason we possess, and the one that
leads us the least astray. In youth, indeed, it occasions errors, but
they are not of a sordid or debasing nature. Newton says that one
final effect of the comets is to recruit the seas and the planets by
a condensation of the vapors and exhalations therein; and so even the
erratic flashes of an imagination really healthful and vigorous deepen
our knowledge and brighten our lights; they recruit our seas and our
stars. Of such flashes my new friend was as innocent as the sternest
matter-of-fact person could desire. Fancies he had in profusion, and
very bad ones; but of imagination not a scintilla! His mind was one
of those which live in a prison of logic, and cannot, or will not, see
beyond the bars such a nature is at once positive and sceptical. This
boy had thought proper to decide at once on the numberless complexities
of the social world from his own harsh experience.

With him the whole system was a war and a cheat. If the universe were
entirely composed of knaves, he would be sure to have made his way. Now
this bias of mind, alike shrewd and unamiable, might be safe enough if
accompanied by a lethargic temper; but it threatened to become terrible
and dangerous in one who, in default of imagination, possessed abundance
of passion: and this was the case with the young outcast. Passion, in