Never before had Daniel Mayfield introduced his sister’s son to any of the haunts in which the best hours of his own careless life had been wasted. The young man was as temperate as a girl, and the dinner-giver had his carefully chosen wines to himself. But as Mayfield grew gay and eloquent with the warming influence of the Burgundian hillside, Eustace Thorburn’s spirits rose in sympathy with his companion. For there is a subtle influence in wine which communicates itself to the man who does not drink as well as to the man who does; and he must be slow and dull of soul who can sit amongst the worshippers of Bacchus and not feel the fiery presence of the god, let his own beverage be no stronger than water. “I have never brought you here before, and I should not have brought you here to-night, Eustace,” said Daniel, and he passed his newly filled glass of Burgundy beneath his nostrils, with the gesture of a connoisseur; “I should not have brought you here to-night, my lad, pleasant though it is to me to see your bright face across the rosy vapour of the South, if you and I were not going to part company. This is Bohemia, Eustace--the land in which jolly good fellows go to the dogs in their own jolly way--and I’m not quite certain that it’s the worst way a man can travel to his ruin. We spend our money, and we live in fear of sheriff’s officers, and we die in sponging-houses; but, after all, we escape many of the heartburnings which your very respectable people suffer. We are no shams--we live our own lives; and are ourselves alone--no phantasmal simulacra of other men. We take existence lightly--share our own good fortune with our needy brothers--and envy no man his luck. But if you have poetic aspirations and noble ambitions, if you want to be a great and a good man, keep clear of us--no great man ever issued from our ranks. We have talent, we have sometimes even genius; but we never achieve. Jones is of the stuff that makes a noble historian; but Jones must have his night in his pet tavern, and a five-pound note at the service of the Pythias of the hour; so he writes showy essays for the magazines. Smith turns his unfinished picture to the wall, in the hour when he was budding into a Rubens, to paint pot-boilers for the fashionable dealers--a young man and woman in a boat off Twickenham, with spinachy foliage and a flimsy blue sky, spotted with little ragged dabs of the palette-knife; or a girl in a striped petticoat playing croquet against a background in which you may count the threads of the canvas. Browne might write a comedy which would remind the critics of Sheridan; but he cannot afford to polish the graceful turns of his dialogue or study the unity of his design, so he does a bad adaptation of a bad French vaudeville, and gets twenty pounds down on the nail for his labour. We possess the elements of greatness; but we can’t wait--we want ready money. The man with a wife and seven children may struggle out of poverty