to these he returned in the evening, remaining there alone with his
little library, and seldom moving out of doors. He was unhealthy
constitutionally, and his habits contributed to make him more so.
Everything which he saw which was good seemed only to sharpen the
contrast between himself and his lot, and his reading was a curse to
him rather than a blessing. I sometimes wished that he had never
inherited any love whatever for what is usually considered to be the
Best, and that he had been endowed with an organisation coarse and
commonplace, like that of his colleagues. If he went into company
which suited him, or read anything which interested him, it seemed as
if the ten hours of the gallery in Fleet Street had been made thereby
only the more insupportable, and his habitual mood was one of
despondency, so that his fellow clerks who knew his tastes not
unnaturally asked what was the use of them if they only made him
wretched; and they were more than ever convinced that in their
amusements lay true happiness. Habit, which is the saviour of most
of us, the opiate which dulls the otherwise unbearable miseries of
life, only served to make Clark more sensitive. The monotony of that
perpetual address-copying was terrible. He has told me with a kind
of shame what an effect it had upon him--that sometimes for days he
would feed upon the prospect of the most childish trifle because it
would break in some slight degree the uniformity of his toil. For
example, he would sometimes change from quill to steel pens and back
again, and he found himself actually looking forward with a kind of
joy--merely because of the variation--to the day on which he had
fixed to go back to the quill after using steel. He would determine,
two or three days beforehand, to get up earlier, and to walk to Fleet
Street by way of Great Queen Street and Lincoln's Inn Fields, and
upon this he would subsist till the day came. He could make no
longer excursions because of his lameness. All this may sound very