ers and daguerreotypers do what
they will, and improve as they may with further skill on that which
skill has already done, they will never achieve a portrait of the
human face divine. Let biographers, novelists, and the rest of us
groan as we may under the burdens which we so often feel too heavy
for our shoulders; we must either bear them up like men, or own
ourselves too weak for the work we have undertaken. There is no way
of writing well and also of writing easily.

_Labor omnia vincit improbus_. Such should be the chosen motto of
every labourer, and it may be that labour, if adequately enduring,
may suffice at last to produce even some not untrue resemblance of
the Rev. Francis Arabin.

Of his doings in the world, and of the sort of fame which he has
achieved, enough has been already said. It has also been said that he
is forty years of age, and still unmarried. He was the younger son of
a country gentleman of small fortune in the north of England. At an
early age he went to Winchester, and was intended by his father for
New College; but though studious as a boy, he was not studious within
the prescribed limits, and at the age of eighteen he left school with
a character for talent, but without a scholarship. All that he had
obtained, over and above the advantage of his character, was a gold
medal for English verse, and hence was derived a strong presumption
on the part of his friends that he was destined to add another name
to the imperishable list of English poets.

From Winchester he went to Oxford, and was entered as a commoner at
Balliol. Here his special career very soon commenced. He utterly
eschewed the society of fast men, gave no wine-parties, kept no
horses, rowed no boats, joined no rows, and was the pride of his
college tutor. Such at least was his career till he had taken his
little go, and then he commenced a course of action which, though not
less creditable to himself as a man, was hardly so much to the taste
of the tutor. He became a member of a vigorous debating society, and
rendered himself remarkable there for humorous energy. Though always
in earnest, yet his earnestness was always droll. To be true in his
ideas, unanswerable in his syllogisms, and just in his aspirations
was not enough for him. He had failed, failed in his own opinion as
well as that of others when others came to know him, if he could not
reduce the arguments of his opponents to an absurdity and conquer
both by wit and re