as that which guides this steel pen. I am not in love with Cecilia
Travers. I wish I were. When Lady Glenalvon, who remains wonderfully
kind to me, says, day after day, "Cecilia Travers would make you a
perfect wife," I have no answer to give; but I don't feel the least
inclined to ask Cecilia Travers if she would waste her perfection on one
who so coldly concedes it.

I find that she persisted in rejecting the man whom her father wished
her to marry, and that he has consoled himself by marrying somebody
else. No doubt other suitors as worthy will soon present themselves.

Oh, dearest of all my friends,--sole friend whom I regard as a
confidant,--shall I ever be in love? and if not, why not? Sometimes
I feel as if, with love as with ambition, it is because I have some
impossible ideal in each, that I must always remain indifferent to the
sort of love and the sort of ambition which are within my reach. I have
an idea that if I did love, I should love as intensely as Romeo, and
that thought inspires me with vague forebodings of terror; and if I
did find an object to arouse my ambition, I could be as earnest in its
pursuit as--whom shall I name?--Caesar or Cato? I like Cato's
ambition the better of the two. But people nowadays call ambition an
impracticable crotchet, if it be invested on the losing side. Cato would
have saved Rome from the mob and the dictator; but Rome could not be
saved, and Cato falls on his own sword. Had we a Cato now, the verdict
at a coroner's inquest would be, "suicide while in a state of unsound
mind;" and the verdict would have been proved by his senseless
resistance to a mob and a dictator! Talking of ambition, I come to the
other exception to the youth of the day; I have named a _demoiselle_, I
now name a _damoiseau_. Imagine a man of about five-and-twenty, and who
is morally about fifty years older than a healthy man of sixty,--imagine
him with the brain of age and the flower of youth; with a heart absorbed
into the brain, and giving warm blood to frigid ideas: a man who sneers
at everything I call lofty, yet would do nothing that he thinks mean; to
whom vice and virtue are as indifferent as they were to the Aesthetics
of Goethe; who would never jeopardize his career as a practical reasoner
by an imprudent virtue, and never sully his reputation by a degrading
vice. Imagine this man with an intellect keen, strong, ready,
unscrupulous, dauntless,--all cleverness and no genius. Imagine this
man