ink I'll go there.'

APPENDIX {313}

CHAPTER I--A WORD FOR LAVENGRO

Lavengro is the history up to a certain period of one of rather a
peculiar mind and system of nerves, with an exterior shy and cold, under
which lurk much curiosity, especially with regard to what is wild and
extraordinary, a considerable quantity of energy and industry, and an
unconquerable love of independence. It narrates his earliest dreams and
feelings, dwells with minuteness on the ways, words, and characters of
his father, mother, and brother; lingers on the occasional resting-places
of his wandering half military childhood; describes the gradual hardening
of his bodily frame by robust exercises, his successive struggles, after
his family and himself have settled down in a small local capital, to
obtain knowledge of every kind, but more particularly philological lore;
his visits to the tent of the Romany chal and the parlour of the
Anglo-German philosopher; the effect produced upon his character by his
flinging himself into contact with people all widely differing from each
other, but all extraordinary; his reluctance to settle down to the
ordinary pursuits of life; his struggles after moral truth; his glimpses
of God and the obscuration of the Divine Being to his mind's eye; and his
being cast upon the world of London, by the death of his father, at the
age of nineteen. {314a} In the world within a world, the world of
London, it shows him playing his part for some time as he best can in the
capacity of a writer for reviews and magazines, and describes what he saw
and underwent whilst labouring in that capacity; it represents him,
however, as never forgetting that he is the son of a brave but poor
gentleman, and that if he is a hack author, he is likewise a scholar. It
shows him doing no dishonourable jobs, and proves that if he occasionally
associates with low characters, he does so chiefly to gratify the
curiosity of a scholar. In his conversations with the apple-woman of
London Bridge the scholar is ever apparent, so, again, in his
acquaintance with the man of the table, for the book is no raker up of
the uncleanness of London; and if it gives what at first sight appears
refuse, it invariably shows that a pearl of some kind, generally a
philological one, is contained amongst it. It shows its hero always
accompanied by his love of independence, scorning in the greatest poverty
to receive favours from anybody, and describes hi