body
who can mend kettles. It is not everybody who is in similar
circumstances to those in which Lavengro was. Lavengro flies from London
and hack authorship, and takes to the roads from fear of consumption; it
is expensive to put up at inns, and even at public-houses, and Lavengro
has not much money; so he buys a tinker's cart and apparatus, and sets up
as tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a person living in a tent, or
in anything else, must do something or go mad; Lavengro had a mind, as he
himself well knew, with some slight tendency to madness, and had he not
employed himself, he must have gone wild; so to employ himself he drew
upon one of his resources, the only one available at the time. Authorship
had nearly killed him, he was sick of reading, and had besides no books;
but he possessed the rudiments of an art akin to tinkering; he knew
something of smithery, having served a kind of apprenticeship in Ireland
to a fairy smith; so he draws upon his smithery to enable him to acquire
tinkering, and through the help which it affords him, owing to its
connection with tinkering, he speedily acquires that craft, even as he
had speedily acquired Welsh, owing to its connection with Irish, which
language he possessed; and with tinkering he amuses himself until he lays
it aside to resume smithery. A man who has any innocent resource, has
quite as much right to draw upon it in need, as he has, upon a banker in
whose hands he has placed a sum; Lavengro turns to advantage, under
particular circumstances, a certain resource which he has but people who
are not so forlorn as Lavengro, and have not served the same
apprenticeship which he had, are not advised to follow his example.
Surely he was better employed in plying the trades of tinker and smith
than in having recourse to vice, in running after milk-maids for example.
Running after milk-maids is by no means an ungenteel rural diversion; but
let any one ask some respectable casuist (the Bishop of London for
example), whether Lavengro was not far better employed, when in the
country, at tinkering and smithery than he would have been in running
after all the milkmaids in Cheshire, though tinkering is in general
considered a very ungenteel employment, and smithery little better,
notwithstanding that an Orcadian poet, who wrote in Norse about eight
hundred years ago, reckons the latter amongst nine noble arts which he
possessed, naming it along with playing at chess, on the