the goal, has the advantage of not being out of breath upon his arrival.
Not that I mean to infer that my life has not been one of adventure. I
only mean to say that, in all which has occurred, I have been a passive,
rather than an active, personage; and, if events of interest are to be
recorded, they certainly have not been sought by me.

As well as I can recollect and analyze my early propensities, I think
that, had I been permitted to select my own profession, I should in all
probability have bound myself apprentice to a tailor; for I always
envied the comfortable seat which they appeared to enjoy upon the
shopboard, and their elevated position, which enabled them to look down
upon the constant succession of the idle or the busy, who passed in
review before them in the main street of the country town, near to which
I passed the first fourteen years of my existence.

But my father, who was a clergyman of the Church of England, and the
youngest brother of a noble family, had a lucrative living, and a "soul
above buttons," if his son had not. It has been from time immemorial the
heathenish custom to sacrifice the greatest fool of the family to the
prosperity and naval superiority of the country, and, at the age of
fourteen, I was selected as the victim. If the custom be judicious, I
had no reason to complain. There was not one dissentient voice, when it
was proposed before all the varieties of my aunts and cousins, invited
to partake of our new-year's festival. I was selected by general
acclamation. Flattered by such an unanimous acknowledgment of my
qualification, and a stroke of my father's hand down my head which
accompanied it, I felt as proud, and, alas! as unconscious as the calf
with gilded horns, who plays and mumbles with the flowers of the garland
which designates his fate to every one but himself. I even felt, or
thought I felt, a slight degree of military ardour, and a sort of vision