For it is a great deal easier to decide that you must turn over a new leaf, and that henceforward, instead of being useless, your life must be profitable to yourself and the world, than it is to decide how this change is to be accomplished. If every man when he begins to take thought of the more serious duties of life could immediately settle himself down as a landed proprietor, with an estate to manage, cottages to improve, farmers to influence, a seat on the bench, and a vote for the county, how many men would see their duty more clearly than they have ever as yet seen it! But we cannot attain all this simply by resolving upon it, and Fanshawe did not know what else to do. He would have made a very creditable squire, and so would hosts of men who don’t make much of their lives in any other way; but he could not dig, nor did he know how to employ his existence so as to fulfill his own wishes, and be of some use to others. He was too old for many things, too old for the army, even could he have done any good in it, too old for the bar, too old for business; for although men in novels can turn their minds to commerce whenever a blank comes in their career, and succeed in it--yet men in common life are usually trained to that branch of activity as to every other, and begin by an apprentice period, in which they earn nothing and do little. Even for the public offices he was too old, and what, Fanshawe asked himself, could he do in a public office? He ran all these things over in his mind till he was in despair. He was willing to do anything; but when he came to particulars, he found that his education had trained him to nothing except those duties of a great proprietor which he had no hope of ever being able to exercise. Nothing is more difficult than thus to begin a new chapter in life. Had he required to earn his living, no doubt the energy which necessity would have given to his quest for employment might have found him something to do; but he had not that stimulus--and he had not the stimulus of aptitude for, or knowledge of, any special kind of occupation. He would have “done anything.” Was that but another way of saying that he was good for nothing? he asked himself sometimes, in partial despair.