s industry. There
may be doubts, however, as to which was using his time best. The one
could afford time to think, and the other never could. The one could
have sympathies and do kindnesses; and the other must needs be always
selfish. He could not cultivate a friendship or do a charity, or admire
a work of genius, or kindle at the sight of beauty or the sound of a
sweet song--he had no time, and no eyes for anything but his law-books.
All was dark outside his reading-lamp. Love, and Nature, and Art (which
is the expression of our praise and sense of the beautiful world of God)
were shut out from him. And as he turned off his lonely lamp at night,
he never thought but that he had spent the day profitably, and went to
sleep alike thankless and remorseless. But he shuddered when he met his
old companion Warrington on the stairs, and shunned him as one that was
doomed to perdition.

It may have been the sight of that cadaverous ambition and
self-complacent meanness, which showed itself in Paley's yellow face,
and twinkled in his narrow eyes, or it may have been a natural appetite
for pleasure and joviality, of which it must be confessed Mr. Pen was
exceedingly fond, which deterred that luckless youth from pursuing
his designs upon the Bench or the Woolsack with the ardour, or rather
steadiness, which is requisite in gentlemen who would climb to those
seats of honour. He enjoyed the Temple life with a great deal of relish:
his worthy relatives thought he was reading as became a regular student;
and his uncle wrote home congratulatory letters to the kind widow
at Fairoaks, announcing that the lad had sown his wild oats, and
was becoming quite steady. The truth is, that it was a new sort of
excitement to Pen, the life in which he was now engaged, and having
given up some of the dandified pretensions, and fine-gentleman airs
which he had contracted among his aristocratic college acquaintances,
of whom he now saw but little, the rough pleasures and amusements of
a London bachelor were very novel and agreeable to him, and he enjoyed
them all. Time was he would have envied the dandies their fine horses
in Rotten Row, but he was contented now to walk in the Park and look
at them. He was too young to succeed in London society without a better
name and a larger fortune than he had, and too lazy to get on without
these adjuncts. Old Pendennis fondly thought he was busied with law
because he neglected the social advantages presented to