would
make his way through the ordinary and conventional paths to
fortune? All the professions are so book-lined, book-hemmed, book-
choked, that wherever these strong hands of mine stretch towards
action, they find themselves met by octavo ramparts, flanked with
quarto crenellations. For first, this college life, opening to
scholarships, and ending, perchance, as you political economists
would desire, in Malthusian fellowships,--premiums for celibacy,--
consider what manner of thing it is!

Three years, book upon book,--a great Dead Sea before one; three
years long, and all the apples that grow on the shore full of the
ashes of pica and primer! Those three years ended, the fellowship,
it may be, won,--still books, books, if the whole world does not
close at the college gates. Do I, from scholar, effloresce into
literary man, author by profession? Books, books! Do I go into
the law? Books, books! Ars longa, vita brevis, which,
paraphrased, means that it is slow work before one fags one's way
to a brief! Do I turn doctor? Why, what but books can kill time
until, at the age of forty, a lucky chance may permit me to kill
something else? The Church (for which, indeed, I don't profess to
be good enough),--that is book-life par excellence, whether,
inglorious and poor, I wander through long lines of divines and
Fathers; or, ambitious of bishoprics, I amend the corruptions, not
of the human heart, but of a Greek text, and through defiles of
scholiasts and commentators win my way to the See. In short,
barring the noble profession of arms,--which you know, after all,
is not precisely the road to fortune,--can you tell me any means by
which one may escape these eternal books, this mental clockwork and
corporeal lethargy? Where can this passion for life that runs riot
through my veins find its vent? Where can these stalwart limbs and
this broad chest grow of value and worth in this hot-bed of
cerebral inflammation and dyspeptic intellect? I know what is in
me; I know I have the qualities that should go with stalwart limbs
and broad chest. I have some plain common-sense, some promptitude
and keenness, some pleasure in hardy danger, some fortitude in
bearing pain,--qualities for which I bless Heaven, for they are
qualities good and useful in private life. But in the forum of
men, in the market of fortune, are they not flo