Roland's passion and energy would have given immediate and forcible effect to study; he might have been a historian or a poet. It is not study alone that produces a writer; it is _intensity_. In the mind, as in yonder chimney, to make the fire burn hot and quick, you must narrow the draught. Whereas, had my father been forced into the practical world, his calm depth of comprehension, his clearness of reason, his general accuracy in such notions as he once entertained and pondered over, joined to a temper that crosses and losses could never ruffle, an utter freedom from vanity and self-love, from prejudice and passion, might have made him a very wise and enlightened counsellor in the great affairs of life--a lawyer, a diplomatist, a statesman, for what I know, even a great general--if his tender humanity had not stood in the way of his military mathematics. But, as it was--with his slow pulse never stimulated by action, and too little stirred by even scholarly ambition--my father's mind went on widening and widening, till the circle was lost in the great ocean of contemplation; and Roland's passionate energy, fretted into fever by every let and hindrance, in the struggle with his kind--and narrowed more and more as it was curbed in the channels of active discipline and duty--missed its due career altogether; and, what might have been the poet, contracted into the humourist. Yet, who that had ever known ye, could have wished you other than ye were--ye guileless, affectionate, honest, simple creatures? simple both, in spite of all the learning of the one, all the prejudices, whims, irritabilities, and crotchets of the other? There you are both seated on the height of the old Roman camp, with a volume of the Stratagems of Polyœnus, (or is it Frontinus?) open on my father's lap; the sheep grazing in the furrows of the circumvallations; the curious steer gazing at you where it halts in the space whence the Roman cohorts glittered forth. And your boy biographer standing behind you with folded arms; and, as the scholar read or the soldier pointed his cane to each fancied post in the war, filling up the pastoral landscape with the eagles of Agrippa and the scythed cars of Boadicea! CHAPTER VI. "It is never the same two hours together in this country," said my Uncle Roland, as, after dinner, or rather after dessert, we joined my mother in the drawing-room. Indeed, a cold drizzling rain had come on within the last two hours; and, though it was July, it was as chilly as if it had been October. My mother whispered to me, and I went out: in ten minutes more, the logs (for we lived in a wooded country) blazed merrily in the grate. Why could not my mother have rung the bell, and ordered the servant to light a fire? My dear reader, Captain Roland was poor, and he made a capital virtue of economy! The two brothers drew their chairs near to the hearth: my father at the left, my uncle at the right; and I and my mother sat down to "Fox and geese."