dition and character in which I then beheld him. He began as follows:

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I need not tell you any thing of the situation and circumstances of my family. You are sufficiently well acquainted with them already, and they are of no importance to a story which relates only to the private feelings and tastes of an individual. From my birth, my nature was characterised by an uncommon delicacy of susceptibility-a quality of being which sometimes creates uncommon mental excellence, but oftener generates more extraordinary moral depravity. But while I was thus dowered with a disposition which inclined me to shrink from struggling with the world, I possessed a strongly ambitious spirit which made enterprise and distinction the earliest dreams of my life. Such an antagonism between the wish and the will, which is often found in man, and never without producing distress and pain.

For the ordinary active sports on which my companions expended their superfluous health and spirits I had no fondness; that sensitiveness which haunted every act and observation with a maddening criticism of shame or ridicule made me shun society, and find no pleasure except in the unfettered freedom of solitude. Books furnished me at once with relief from the annoying workings of an unoccupied attention, and with that interest and excitement with which I loved to feed my fancy. I read incessantly, biography and history being my principal delights. I assumed the consciousness and partook the nature, rather than followed the career of those who had won the loftiest eminences in art and arms. When my thoughts were thus elevated by an imagined kindred with the great, and my feelings overshone with a borrowed lustre of unreal importance, it was a dreary dissipation of the vivid, albeit visionary joy that filmed my mental sight, and a stripping off of the airy but delightful robes in which my musings had invested me so royally, to descend into the actual world and assume among my fellows the place which my unpractised abilities could acquire for me. Defeat and

bitter failure of course attended the attempt to maintain in truth, what fancy had assumed-to transfer to the stage of reality that character which the green-room of meditation had rehearsed. I found myself flung down from that fellowship with greatness and distinction to which the repeated contemplation of those conditions had insensibly raised me, and it is not wonderful that from every experience of the unwelcome difference of dreams and deeds I retreated within the shadow of past times, and in the loneliness of the library again invested myself with the forms and fictions of ideal action. When I was visited by reflections of the unworthiness of this slothful pleasure, and the fact pressed itself upon me that I was actually inferior to all about me in those trials which belonged to our age, I summoned contempt to my protection, and persuaded myself that I failed in the sports and labours which others delighted in, only because they were too trifling for my attention, and that I was reserving my powers for more fitting effort in the great scenes of maturer life. When I called up pictures of the stirring enterprise of the world before a mind bold in speculation and daring in idea, there seemed no labour to which I was unequal; and I thus comforted the failure of the present with the triumphs of the future-still putting off to coming days the exertion of powers which every day was enfeebling and unstringing, and not perceiving that constantly as time passed on the work grew more difficult, and the ability grew weaker. My friends observed my devotion to books and commended the diligence of my knowledge-loving habits, and that was applauded as a studious disposition which ought to have been condemned as sloth and timidness. The information which I acquired, not being treasured and arranged with reference to future use, only coloured the romance of my spirit and gave a ground and a material for the architecture of the unshaped schemes which filled my whole consideration. I read, to find in that employment, escape from pain and waste of feeling, rather than to school my intellect or furnish my memory; and while the lettered page

was still before my eyes there almost always floated between, some of the visions that arise without a sleep.' Where the understanding is robust and the passions not undisciplined, miscellaneous reading is perhaps not injudiciously recommended; still it will be generallyfound that in professions or stations which imply action and require energy, those who have reached the highest eminence have usually not been bred in habits of acquisitive study. The uncertain resolution and vacillating purpose of those who have drawn their education from books are very opposite to the prompt decision and fixed design demanded by business. Morals and philosophy deal not with conclusions; their course is everlastingly progressive-their works continuously cumulative. Even where the later life is likely to have a literary cast, and will certainly be benefited by a youth of reading, I think that there is one species of study often enjoined and readily embraced which is likely to produce more injury than good-I mean biographies and memoirs. For the lives of distinguished persons present to us the performance of the man, but not the preparation of the boy; we see how successfully skill was exerted, but not how laboriously it was acquired; we behold the efforts but not the elements of power; we look upon a picture of obedient energies and willing vigour, and overlook the years of training and breaking which subdued the nature to this necessary law. And the contemplation of finished results in character tends, I suspect, to seduce the toils of the young student, and will certainly dash the important hopefulness of his labours by suggesting that the pains and assiduity which he must put forth were not requisite in their case, and will disgust him with that wild crudeness in himself which he supposes was never shared by the models which he emulates.

"I passed through college with a kind of factitious reputation which was based upon some vague opinion of ability which went abroad, but would have been completely destroyed in the first moment that it was fully tested-a doubtful distinction which was founded on no

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one positive act or specific talent, but gained by exhibiting irregular glimpses of power in small matters, which the vulgar magnified into an indefinite possibility of success in every thing I might choose to undertake. An extensive acquaintance with literary history, which is the gossipry of learning, enabled me to affect a plausible familiarity with sciences, of whose precise and serious details I really knew nothing; and by talking over the heads of people upon a number of subjects of which it is creditable to young students to be ignorant, I gained a character for knowledge, which made the unthinking envious, but would have been deemed wholly worthless by the judicious and discerning. I lived almost wholly alone, and mingled rarely, and then distantly, with even those of my own class and standing; and this seclusion, joined with expressions of contemptuous sentiment which I took care to have handed about, gained me at once respect and dislike. were several literary societies in the college, and I became a member of one of them. It was my earnest ambition to be distinguished in the debates which took place in this body, and if I could have divested myself of the diseased and absurd feelings into which I had cradled myself, and thrown my mind resolutely into the task, I think that I had knowledge and talent enough to have succeeded reasonably well. But it was pretty certain that my first efforts would be failures, and I feared to peril upon this trial the reputation which I already possessed. My pride conspired with my diffidence to keep me silent. I had so familiarized my thoughts with the brightness of mature success that I could not think of descending to pick my way through the dark and broken road of practice and toil which led to it, and I accordingly maintained a sullen silence of ill-affected contempt while I sat by and saw others passing through the ordeal of repeated defeat to that certainty of triumph which I longed to seize. With a curling lip and a sneering eye I regarded the contest, and laughed at performances which I secretly envied. The mob imagined that I might have excelled if I had

chosen, and that nothing but indolence or indifference kept me silent; I knew in my heart the falsehood of the defence, and that knowledge stung me with mortification. From the distress of regret and self-condemnation with which I was thus ceaselessly harassed, my only refuge was in those opiate consolations of the fancy with which the tedious hours of my youth had been so often soothed. In the hours not occupied by lectures and recitations, I shut myself up in my room, and dismissed all my thoughts and feelings into the world of dreams. The ambition which was balked and baffled in the daily experience, there triumphed with boundless power; the longings of the sensitive heart, which found no aliment in the dull callousness of the exterior scene, made for themselves a rich satisfaction in the realms of fiction. The glory which I hourly sighed for was at my feet; the romance of greatness which flitted before the eye of hope was spread before me in all its pomp and vastness of delight. Those qualities of appetence and acquisition whose disproportion in the actual view produced the misery which vexed my nature, changed their functions in the ideal sphere; the wish became the prodigal purveyor to the mind, and fancy wrought out the bright condition which made the reason gaze with wonder. The honour which most I coveted was distinction in literature, and it was the supposed possession of this reward with which I pleased my senses in these reveries of the day. I read the most finished and brilliant productions of the most famous poets before an ideal audience, and felt the pleasure which the rarest success of authorship bestows. The amaranth of unfading glory shaded my brows, and the plaudits of eager admiration were ever ringing in my ears. Gradually the persuasion of this baseless situation ate away the consciousness of my true position, and I lived, and moved, and went through all the affairs of life, girt with the abiding splendour of a dream.

"I left college, and entered into the amusements of society. For two or three years the novelty of min