subject, from Wordsworthian sonnets on the singing of his tea-
kettle to epic fragments on the Fall of Empires. His
discovery at the age of five-and-twenty that these inspired
works were not jumped at by the publishers with all the
eagerness they deserved, coincided in point of time with a
severe hint from his father that unless he went on with his
legitimate profession he might have to look elsewhere than at
home for an allowance. Mr. Somerset junior then awoke to
realities, became intently practical, rushed back to his dusty
drawing-boards, and worked up the styles anew, with a view of
regularly starting in practice on the first day of the
following January.

It is an old story, and perhaps only deserves the light tone
in which the soaring of a young man into the empyrean, and his
descent again, is always narrated. But as has often been
said, the light and the truth may be on the side of the
dreamer: a far wider view than the wise ones have may be his
at that recalcitrant time, and his reduction to common measure
be nothing less than a tragic event. The operation called
lunging, in which a haltered colt is made to trot round and
round a horsebreaker who holds the rope, till the beholder
grows dizzy in looking at them, is a very unhappy one for the
animal concerned. During its progress the colt springs
upward, across the circle, stops, flies over the turf with the
velocity of a bird, and indulges in all sorts of graceful
antics; but he always ends in one way--thanks to the knotted
whipcord--in a level trot round the lunger with the regularity
of a horizontal wheel, and in the loss for ever to his
character of the bold contours which the fine hand of Nature