an fall short of them."

"Nay, then," said Oldbuck, removing his hand, and turning again to
the road, "if you are so true a philosopher as to think you have money
enough, there's no more to be said--I cannot pretend to be entitled to
advise you;--you have attained the acme'--the summit of perfection. And
how came Fairport to be the selected abode of so much self-denying
philosophy? It is as if a worshipper of the true religion had set up his
staff by choice among the multifarious idolaters of the land of Egypt.
There is not a man in Fairport who is not a devoted worshipper of the
Golden Calf--the mammon of unrighteousness. Why, even I, man, am so
infected by the bad neighbourhood, that I feel inclined occasionally to
become an idolater myself."

"My principal amusements being literary," answered Lovel, "and
circumstances which I cannot mention having induced me, for a time at
least, to relinquish the military service, I have pitched on Fairport
as a place where I might follow my pursuits without any of those
temptations to society which a more elegant circle might have presented
to me."

"Aha!" replied Oldbuck, knowingly,--"I begin to understand your
application of my ancestor's motto. You are a candidate for public
favour, though not in the way I first suspected,--you are ambitious to
shine as a literary character, and you hope to merit favour by labour
and perseverance?"

Lovel, who was rather closely pressed by the inquisitiveness of the old
gentleman, concluded it would be best to let him remain in the error
which he had gratuitously adopted.

"I have been at times foolish enough," he replied, "to nourish some
thoughts of the kind."

"Ah, poor fellow! nothing can be more melancholy; unless, as young
men sometimes do, you had fancied yourself in love with some trumpery
specimen of womankind, which is indeed, as Shakspeare truly says,
pressing to death, whipping, and hanging all at once."

He then proceeded with inquiries, which he was sometimes kind enough to
answer himself. For this good old gentleman had, from his antiquarian
researches, acquired a delight in building theories out of premises
which were often far from affording sufficient ground for them; and
being, as the reader must have remarked, sufficiently opinionative,
he did not readily brook being corrected, either in matter of fact or
judgment, even by those who were principally interested in the subjects
on which he speculated. He went on, there