of 1808, so
candid--indeed more than candid--as to many juvenile irregularities,
contains no confession that supports the broad assertion to which I
have alluded; nor can I easily believe, that with his affection for
his father, and that sense of duty which seems to have been inherent
in his character, and, lastly, with the evidence of a most severe
training in industry which the habits of his after-life presented, it
is at all deserving of serious acceptation. His mere handwriting,
indeed, continued, during the whole of his prime, to afford most
striking and irresistible proof how completely he must have submitted
himself for some very considerable period to the mechanical discipline
of his father's office. It spoke to months after months of this humble
toil, as distinctly as the illegible scrawl of Lord Byron did to his
self-mastership from the hour that he left Harrow. There are some
little technical tricks, such as no gentleman who has not been
subjected to a similar regimen ever can fall into, which he practised
invariably while composing his poetry, which appear not unfrequently
on the MSS. of his best novels, and which now and then dropt
instinctively from his pen, even in the private letters and diaries of
his closing years. I allude particularly to a sort of flourish at the
bottom of the page, originally, I presume, adopted in engrossing as a
safeguard against the intrusion of a forged line between the
legitimate text and the attesting signature. He was quite sensible
that this ornament might as well be dispensed with; and his family
often heard him mutter, after involuntarily performing it, "There goes
the old shop again!"

I {p.128} dwell on this matter because it was always his favorite
tenet, in contradiction to what he called the cant of sonneteers, that
there is no necessary connection between genius and an aversion or
contempt for any of the common duties of life; he thought, on the
contrary, that to spend some fair portion of every day in any matter
of fact occupation is good for the higher faculties themselves in the
upshot. In a word, from beginning to end, he piqued himself on being
_a man of business_; and did--with one sad and memorable
exception--whatever the ordinary course of things threw in his way, in
exactly the businesslike fashion which might have been expected from
the son of a thoroughbred old Clerk to the Signet, who had never
deserted his father's profession.

In the winter of 1788,