Here he practised for a few years regularly, and with very fair success, but his professional career was destined to be short and broken, and need not detain us. It is his home life with which we are concerned, and it was the pressure of what he looked upon as a higher home duty which decided him, after a struggle, to abandon his profession. He was married in the autumn of 1852, and, in the course of a few years, the health of his wife’s mother by adoption made it desirable that they should be always with her, and that she should spend the winter months abroad. When it became clear that this was necessary, he accepted it, and made the best of it; though I find abundant traces in his correspondence of the effort which it required to do so. Thus he writes from Pau, the place fixed upon for their foreign winter residence, “I always found that changing one’s residence and plans gave one a fit of the blues for a time, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.” And again; “The business of life is to be bored in all directions. You must not imagine, however, that I am ill, or out of spirits. I have no right to be either, and won’t be, please God.” But the necessary want of regular employment, the sinking into what is called “an idle man,” and abandoning all active part in “the struggle for existence,” was no small trial to one who held that the “full employment of all powers, physical, mental, and spiritual, is the true secret of happiness, so that no time may be left for morbid self-analysis.” You are all perhaps too young to understand this, and probably, when you think about such matters at all, imagine that the happiest life must be one in which you would only have to amuse yourselves. It may, I hope, shake any such belief to find that the period in my brother’s life in which he was thus thrown on his own resources, and had the most complete liberty to follow his own fancies, was just that in which you may find traces of _ennui_, and a tendency to be dissatisfied with the daily task of getting through time.