Here my companion allowed himself a mild gesture of dissent, clasping his bony fingers over his knotted knees, as if prepared to go into the subject at length. “You are one of those people,” said he, “who seem to think the world is intended for a place of uninterrupted rest and enjoyment—a sort of ‘Fiddler’s Green,’ as sailors term their paradise, where it is to be ‘beer and skittles’ every day and all day long. You would have no ‘small end to the horn,’ as my friends over the water say; and what sort of music do you think you could blow out of it? You would have food without hunger, rest without labour, energy without effort. You would be always going down-hill, instead of up. And think where your journey would end at last! You object to the mill, you say, and yet it is that same process of grinding which converts the grain into flour fit for bread. Look at the untried man, the youth embarking on his career, vain, ignorant, sanguine, over-confident, prejudiced. How is he to learn his own powers, his capabilities of endurance, his energy under difficulties, above all, his readiness of resource, save by repeated disappointment and reverse? You have alluded to statesmen, commanders, and poets, who, in seven-leagued boots, as it were, reached the top of the hill at one stride. But Pitt’s was an abnormal temperament—a grey head upon green shoulders—an old man’s heart beating its regular pulsations within the slender compass of a young man’s waistcoat. Nelson’s chivalrous and romantic disposition preserved him from the overweening vanity and self-esteem that might have been looked for as the result of such brilliant achievements at so early an age. His mad, absorbing passion, too, may have scored many a furrow in the hero’s heart, while his young brow remained smooth and fair as marble. ‘On vieillit bientôt sur le champ de bataille!’ and the first Napoleon’s aphorism holds good no surer on the field of honour than in the lists of love. Shelley’s fate was scarcely an enviable one; and did you like Byron any better after you had read his letters and learned the demoralising effects, even on such genius as his, of temples crowned by an immortal Fame, ere yet the beard had sprouted on his chin? “Alexander of Macedon, indeed, conquered the world before he was thirty, and—drank himself to death ere he had reached his prime!