norant, and when
the merits of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Crabbe were brought into
comparison, and Lord Holland cut jokes upon Allen for his
enthusiastic admiration of the 'De Moribus Germanorum,' it was
not that I had not read the poets or the historian, but that I
felt I had not read them with profit. I have not that familiarity
with either which enables me to discuss their merits, and a
painful sense came over me of the difference between one who has
superficially read and one who has studied, one who has laid a
solid foundation in early youth, gathering knowledge as he
advances in years, all the stores of his mind being so orderly
disposed that they are at all times available, and one who (as I
have done) has huddled together a quantity of loose reading, as
vanity, curiosity, and not seldom shame impelled; reading thus
without system, more to cover the deficiencies of ignorance than
to augment the stores of knowledge, loads the mind with an
undigested mass of matter, which proves when wanted to be of
small practical utility--in short, one must pay for the follies
of one's youth. He who wastes his early years in horse-racing and
all sorts of idleness, figuring away among the dissolute and the
foolish, must be content to play an inferior part among the
learned and the wise. Some instances there are of men who have
united both characters, but it will be found that these have had
frequent laborious intervals, that though they may have been
vicious, they have never been indolent, and that their minds have
never slumbered and lost by disuse the power of exertion.
Reflections of this sort make me very uncomfortable, and I am
ready to cry with vexation when I think on my misspent life. If I
was insensible to a higher order of merit, and indifferent to a
nobler kind of praise, I should be happier far; but to be
tormented with the sentiment of an honourable ambition and with
aspirations after better things, and at the same time so sunk in
sloth and bad habits as to be incapable of those exertions
without which their objects are unattainable, is of all
conditions the worst. I sometimes think that it would be better
for me, as I am not what I might have been (if my education had
been less neglected, and my mind had undergone a better system of
moral discipline), if I was still lower than I am in the scale,
and belonged entirely to a more degraded caste; and then again,
when I look forward to that period which is fast approach