flute was breathing an air of romance through the melancholy walls: "Is
it too late yet to employ this still busy brain upon works that will live
when I am dust, and make Posterity supply the heir that fails to my
house?"

He shut himself up with immortal authors--he meditated on the choice of a
theme; his knowledge was wide, his taste refined;--words!--he could not
want words! Why should he not write? Alas; why indeed?--He who has
never been a writer in his youth, can no more be a writer in his age than
he can be a painter--a musician. What! not write a book! Oh, yes--as he
may paint a picture or set a song. But a writer, in the emphatic sense
of the word--a writer as Darrell was an orator--oh, no! And, least of
all, will he be a writer if he has been an orator by impulse and habit--
an orator too happily gifted to require, and too laboriously occupied to
resort to, the tedious aids of written preparation--an orator as modern
life forms orators--not, of course, an orator like those of the classic
world, who elaborated sentences before delivery, and who, after delivery,
polished each extemporaneous interlude into rhetorical exactitude and
musical perfection. And how narrow the range of compositions to a man
burdened already by a grave reputation! He cannot have the self-
abandonment--he cannot venture the headlong charge--with which Youth
flings the reins to genius, and dashes into the ranks of Fame. Few and
austere his themes--fastidious and hesitating his taste. Restricted are
the movements of him who walks for the first time into the Forum of
Letters with the purple hem on his senatorial toga. Guy Darrell, at his
age, entering among authors as a novice!--he, the great lawyer, to whom
attorneys would have sent no briefs had he been suspected of coquetting
with a muse,--he, the great orator who had electrified audiences in
proportion to the sudden effects which distinguish oral inspiration from
written eloquence--he achieve now, in an art which his whole life had