--What sort of man
shall I decide to be? At nineteen one asks oneself this question; at
thirty-nine we say, "I wish Fate hadn't made me this sort of man."

In those days I was a reader of much well-meant advice to young men,
and I gathered that, whether I should become a Sir Lancelot, a Herr
Teufelsdrockh, or an Iago was a matter for my own individual choice.
Whether I should go through life gaily or gravely was a question the
pros and cons of which I carefully considered. For patterns I turned to
books. Byron was then still popular, and many of us made up our minds
to be gloomy, saturnine young men, weary with the world, and prone to
soliloquy. I determined to join them.

For a month I rarely smiled, or, when I did, it was with a weary, bitter
smile, concealing a broken heart--at least that was the intention.
Shallow-minded observers misunderstood.

"I know exactly how it feels," they would say, looking at me
sympathetically, "I often have it myself. It's the sudden change in the
weather, I think;" and they would press neat brandy upon me, and suggest
ginger.

Again, it is distressing to the young man, busy burying his secret
sorrow under a mound of silence, to be slapped on the back by
commonplace people and asked--"Well, how's 'the hump' this morning?"
and to hear his mood of dignified melancholy referred to, by those who
should know better, as "the sulks."

There are practical difficulties also in the way of him who would play
the Byronic young gentleman. He must be supernaturally wicked--or rather
must have been; only, alas! in the unliterary grammar of life, where
the future tense stands first, and the past is formed, not from the
indefinite, but from the present indicative, "to have been" is "to be";
and to be wicked on a small income is impossible. The ruin of even the
simplest of maidens costs money. In the Courts of Love one cannot sue in
forma pauperis; nor would it be the Byronic method.

"To drown remembrance in the cup" sounds well, but then the "cup," to be
fitting, should be of some expensive brand. To drink deep of old Tokay
or Asti is poetical; but when one's purse necessitates that the draught,
if it is to be deep enough to drown anything, should be of thin beer at
five-and-nine the four and a half gallon cask, or something similar in
price, sin is robbed of its flavour.

Possibly also--let me think it--the conviction may have been within
me that Vice, even at its daintiest, is but an ugly, so