fixed purpose; it is the purpose, not the thought, which must
continually animate our exertions; and the purpose binds down the current
of thought rigidly to its own service. Literature is the luxury of the
spirit, the free aristocratic life of intellectual pleasure; profession is
the useful but fettered existence of the sons of toil. In the one, the
spirit revels as a mountain stream that leaps in the face of heaven from
crag to crag; in the other, it is the same stream, lower down, confined in
narrow channel, and half-buried by the ponderous wheel-work of that
ever-clacking mill which it has to turn.

What wonder, then, that the literary man should have certain disgusts to
overcome when he is called on to forsake his own free and variable life,
for a mode of existence where thought is no longer her own mistress, but,
with constant repetition, must take service in the mechanism of society?
And he does often recalcitrate. But when, owing to some overruling motive
of ambition or necessity, this distaste is overcome, it is an immense
advantage which the possessor of literary talents has over the ordinary
practitioner of any profession. In that of the law it has been especially
remarked, that those who have been most eminently successful have
confessed to the repugnance they had, in the first instance, to conquer;
and such examples of eminent success have, for the most part, consisted of
men who had betrayed a decided talent and aptitude for literature.

The writer whom we have before us is a striking instance of literary
tastes being irresistibly borne down by the craving after active life,
and, perhaps, a strong impulse of ambition. The present work is sufficient
to testify that, however vivid his imagination, his patience is still
greater. We know him to be one of those who abhor rest, who court fatigue,
to whom the utmost drudgery becomes welcome when invested with the
interest of an immediate practical purpose. To one of such a stamp,
literature could only prove a sort of apprenticeship to cultivate and
develope his mind, not to determine his career. And so it has been. It was
in vain that nature placed the pencil in his hand; she could not win him
to the repose of the artist; his spirit was already pledged to a life of
action, of toil, of hope, of enterprise. All along he has chosen the path
of forensic ambition, nor, when most exerting his fancy, has he ever
swerved from the goal. May success await him in his laborio