Edgar was a very sensible, reasonable young fellow, but yet it was a consolation to him, in his sudden fall, to reflect that every man may conquer circumstances, and that will and energy are better than riches. He had dreamt of “doing something,” if not to make himself known and famous, at least to be of use in this life to his fellow-creatures and to himself. He meant it firmly up to the day when he left everything he knew or cared for, and he meant it the next day, and the day after, and even the next year; but up to this moment he had done nothing. For after all what was there to do? Young Paladins cannot kill fiery dragons, cannot meet giants in single combat, cannot deliver a whole district now-a-days by the stroke of a sword. To be sure, a man whose tastes lie that way may tackle the giant, Sewage, or attack the dragon, Ignorance; but that is slow work, seldom of a primitive, straightforward kind, and leading the fighter into many entanglements, dubious company, and very uncertain results. So the consequence was that poor Edgar meaning to do much, did nothing--not because he loved idleness, but because he did not know what to do. He wandered off abroad very soon disgusted with everything; with his downfall and his inability to surmount that downfall; with the meanness of estimating worth by rank and wealth, and the still greater meanness of his own incapacity to get quite free from that standard, which, so long as he was himself rich and great, he had disowned manfully. Cheerily he had laughed at the frivolity of the young men of fashion surrounding him when he was as they, but his laugh now had a certain bitterness, and he felt himself turn with a sickening of the heart from intercourse with a lower class, and then deeply and bitterly despised himself for this ignoble sentiment. His state of mind, indeed, though strange and miserable to himself, was no more than was natural and to be looked for in a man forcibly transplanted from the place of his natural growth, and from all the habits and traditions of his previous life. Therefore, these three years had been a failure with Edgar. He had done nothing with them, he who had gone out of his old existence firmly determined to do so much. He had wandered about over the face of the earth, to and fro, an unquiet spirit--but no good had come from any of his wanderings. He could not help being kind and charitable; it was no virtue on his part, but “just a carnal inclination;” and except this inevitable goodness, which was an affair of temperament, nothing had come of him, nothing had come from him, in these years.