entertaining ideas within him, he may hold that he can express them in
fresh and charming language. He may, in short, have a "vocation," or
feel conscious of a vocation, which is not exactly the same thing. There
are "many thyrsus bearers, few mystics," many are called, few chosen.
Still, to be sensible of a vocation is something, nay, is much, for most
of us drift without any particular aim or predominant purpose. Nobody
can justly censure people whose chief interest is in letters, whose chief
pleasure is in study or composition, who rejoice in a fine sentence as
others do in a well modelled limb, or a delicately touched landscape,
nobody can censure them for trying their fortunes in literature. Most of
them will fail, for, as the bookseller's young man told an author once,
they have the poetic temperament, without the poetic power. Still among
these whom _Pendennis_ has tempted, in boyhood, to run away from school
to literature as Marryat has tempted others to run away to sea, there
must be some who will succeed. But an early and intense ambition is not
everything, any more than a capacity for taking pains is everything in
literature or in any art.

Some have the gift, the natural incommunicable power, without the
ambition, others have the ambition but no other gift from any Muse. This
class is the more numerous, but the smallest class of all has both the
power and the will to excel in letters. The desire to write, the love of
letters may shew itself in childhood, in boyhood, or youth, and mean
nothing at all, a mere harvest of barren blossom without fragrance or
fruit. Or, again, the concern about letters may come suddenly, when a
youth that cared for none of those things is waning, it may come when a
man suddenly finds that he has something which he really must tell. Then
he probably fumbles about for a style, and his first fresh impulses are
more or less marred by his inexperience of an art which beguiles and
fascinates others even in their school-days.