ospects. He was disgusted with the littleness of the
agents and springs of political life--he had formed a weary contempt
for the barrenness of literary reputation. At thirty years of age he had
necessarily outlived the sanguine elasticity of early youth, and he
had already broken up many of those later toys in business and ambition
which afford the rattle and the hobby-borse to our maturer manhood.
Always asking for something too refined and too exalted for human life,
every new proof of unworthiness in men and things saddened or revolted
a mind still too fastidious for that quiet contentment with the world
as it is, which we must all learn before we can make our philosophy
practical and our genius as fertile of the harvest as it may be prodigal
of the blossom. Haughty, solitary, and unsocial, the ordinary resources
of mortified and disappointed men were not for Ernest Maltravers.
Rigidly secluded in his country retirement, he consumed the days in
moody wanderings; and in the evenings he turned to books with a spirit
disdainful and fatigued. So much had he already learned, that books
taught him little that he did not already know. And the biographies of
authors, those ghost-like beings who seem to have had no life but in
the shadow of their own haunting and imperishable thoughts, dimmed the
inspiration he might have caught from their pages. Those slaves of the
Lamp, those Silkworms of the Closet, how little had they enjoyed, how
little had they lived! Condemned to a mysterious fate by the wholesale
destinies of the world, they seemed born but to toil and to spin
thoughts for the common crowd--and, their task performed in drudgery and
in darkness, to die when no further service could be wrung from their
exhaustion. Names had they been in life, and as names they lived for
ever, in life as in death, airy and unsubstantial phantoms. It pleased
Maltravers at this time to turn a curious eye towards the obscure and
half-extinct philosophies of the ancient world. He compared the Stoics
with the Epicureans--those Epicureans who had given their own version to
the simple and abstemious utilitarianism of their master. He asked which
was the wiser, to sharpen pain or to deaden pleasure--to bear all or to
enjoy all; and, by a natural reaction which often happens to us in life,
this man, hitherto so earnest, active-spirited, and resolved on great
things, began to yearn for the drowsy pleasures of indolence. The
garden grew more temptin