Yet let me do myself justice; whether wise or weak in the presence of the only being who had ever mastered my mind, I was determined not "to point a moral and adorn a tale." I had other duties and other purposes before me than to degenerate into a slave of sighs. I was to be no Romeo, bathing my soul in the luxuries of Italian palace-chambers, moonlight speeches, and the song of nightingales. I felt that I was an Englishman, and had the rugged steep of fortune to climb, and climb alone. The time, too, in which I was to begin my struggle for distinction, aroused me to shake off the spirit of dreams which threatened to steal over my nature. The spot in which I lived was the metropolis of mankind. I was in the centre of the machinery which moved the living world. The wheels of the globe were rushing, rolling, and resounding in my ears. Every interest, necessity, stimulant, and passion of mankind, came in an incessant current to London, as to the universal heart, and flowed back, refreshed and invigorated, to the extremities of civilization. I saw the hourly operations of that mighty furnace in which the fortunes of all nations were mingled, and poured forth remolded. And London itself was never more alive. Every journal which I took up was filled with the signs of this extraordinary energy; the projects and meetings, the harangues and political experiments, of bold men, some rising from the mire into notoriety, if not into fame; some plunging from the highest rank of public life into the mire, in the hope of rising, if with darkened, yet a freshened wing. The debates in parliament, never more vivid than at this crisis, with the two great parties in full force, and throwing out flashes in every movement, like the collision of two vast thunder clouds, were a perpetual summons to action in every breast which felt itself above the dust it trod. But the French journals were the true excitements to political ardour. They were more than lamps, guiding mankind along the dusky paths of public regeneration--they were torches, dazzling the multitude who attempted to profit by their light; and, while they threw a glare round the head of the march, blinding all who followed. To one born, like myself, in the most aristocratic system of society on earth, yet excluded from its advantages by the mere chance of birth, it was new, and undoubtedly not displeasing, to see the pride of nobility tamed by the new rush of talent and ambition which had started up from obscurity in France; village attorneys and physicians, clerks in offices, journalists, men from the plough and the pen, supplying the places of the noblesse of Clovis and Capet, possessing themselves of the highest power while their predecessors were flying through Europe; conducting negotiations, commanding armies, ruling assemblies, holding the helm of government in the storm which had scattered the great names of France upon the waters. I anticipated all the triumph of the "younger sons."