There was no odour of the midnight oil in the poet’s verses. They breathed the freshness of youth, the perfume of woods and groves; the harmonious lines were musical with the ripple of cool waters, the low sound of leafy branches swaying gently in the summer wind. The life which Eustace Thorburn led at Greenlands was the ideal existence for which the poet sighs, for which he yearns with fond imaginings, pent up in the darksome city counting-house, chained to the cruel wheel of distasteful labour. Nor was the young man ungrateful to Providence, or to the kindly kinsman who had procured for him so pleasant a position. He thanked God for his easy existence, his congenial labours; and he wrote sweet, playful letters, full of affection and gratitude, to Uncle Dan, who treasured those effusions, and was pleased to favour his friends and boon-companions with the recital of eloquent little bits in those delightful epistles. “What would you give to be able to write like that, Tom Granger?” he said to one of his associates. “You write uncommonly well, you know, dear boy, and so does John Harrington, and Ted Rochester, and Frank Dorset; and there’s plenty of _chic_ in all you do. You all write uncommonly well, Tom; you can all describe the things you see every day, _from the outside_, with a certain amount of smartness; but there is no more evidence of thought in your compositions than if you were so many copying-machines; and you all write so like one another, that if Frank wrote page one, and Ted page two, and John page three, no one but themselves and the compositors who set-up their copy would be any the wiser. You have all got the slang of the day, and you all write for the current market, and you are all wise in your generation. But the day will come when this boy here will show you that a writer may have something more than ‘a knack,’ and be something better than a publisher’s ‘clever hand.’”