what cared I for money? I had obtained a profession in which money was
contemptible, the only purse the military chest, and the only prize,
like Nelson's, a peerage or Westminster Abbey. The ferment did not cool
within the week, and within that period I had taken leave of half the
county, been wished laurels and aiguillettes by a hundred or a thousand
of the fairest of our country belles; and been wished a thousand miles
off by the wise matrons, to whom the sight of a "younger son without
house or land" is a nuisance, a kite among their family pigeons.

At that moment, however, all their dovecots were secure. I should not
have spent a sigh on the Venus de Medicis had she sprung from her
pedestal to enchant me. The world was open before me; and trite and
trifling objects were no more to occupy my time. I felt like one who,
after wandering all day through the depths of an American forest,
suddenly reaches its border, and sees before him the boundless prairie,
with its boundlessness still more striking, from the absence of any
distinct object on which the eye could rest. What were horses, dogs, and
country dinners, to the world of London and of life which now came in
full, and, I will own it, extravagant vision before me? The ideas which
I conceived of men and things, of my own fortunes, and the fortunate
exercise of my own powers, were of an order which, in my calmer days,
have often made me smile; yet what is the whole early life of man but a
predisposition to fever? and I was then throbbing on the fiery verge of
the disease.

I shall say but little of my first sensations on reaching London. My
eyes and ears were in full activity. But the impression upon all who
enter this mightiest of capitals for the first time, is nearly the same.
Its perpetual multitude, its incessant movement, its variety of
occupations, sights and sounds, the echo of the whole vast and sleepless