ome slight
tendency to madness, and had he not employed himself, he must have gone
wild; so to employ himself he drew upon one of his resources, the only
one available at the time. Authorship had nearly killed him, he was sick
of reading, and had besides no books; but he possessed the rudiments of
an art akin to tinkering; he knew something of smithery, having served a
kind of apprenticeship in Ireland to a fairy smith; so he draws upon his
smithery to enable him to acquire tinkering, he speedily acquires that
craft, even as he had speedily acquired Welsh, owing to its connection
with Irish, which language he possessed; and with tinkering he amuses
himself until he lays it aside to resume smithery. A man who has an
innocent resource, has quite as much right to draw upon it in need, as he
has upon a banker in whose hands he has placed a sum; Lavengro turns to
advantage, under particular circumstances, a certain resource which he
has, but people who are not so forlorn as Lavengro, and have not served
the same apprenticeship which he had, are not advised to follow his
example. Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker
and smith than in having recourse to vice, in running after milk-maids,
for example. Running after milk-maids is by no means an ungenteel rural
diversion; but let any one ask some respectable casuist (the Bishop of
London for example), whether Lavengro was not far better employed, when
in the country, at tinkering and smithery than he would have been in
running after all the milk-maids in Cheshire, though tinkering is in
general considered a very ungenteel employment, and smithery little
better, notwithstanding that an Orcadian poet, who wrote in Norse about
eight hundred years ago, reckons the latter among nine noble arts which
he possessed, naming it along with playing at chess, on the harp, and
ravelling runes, or as the original has it, "treading runes"--that is,
compressing them into a small compass by mingling one letter with
another, even as the Turkish caligraphists ravel the Arabic letters, more
especially those who write talismans.

"Nine arts have I, all noble;
I play at chess so free,
At ravelling runes I'm ready,
At books and smithery;
I'm skilled o'er ice at skimming
On skates, I shoot and row,
And few at harping match me,
Or minstrelsy, I trow."

But though Lavengro takes up smithery, which, though the Orcadian ranks
it with chess-playing and