"Your friendship makes too flattering the acumen of your judgment,"
answered the modest Clutterbuck. "It has indeed been my lot to cultivate
the fields of truth, as transmitted unto our hands by the wise men of
old; and I have much to be thankful for, that I have, in the employ, been
neither curtailed in my leisure, nor abased in my independence--the two
great goods of a calm and meditative mind; yet are there moments in which
I am led to doubt of the wisdom of my pursuits: and when, with a feverish
and shaking hand, I put aside the books which have detained me from my
rest till the morning hour, and repair unto a couch often baffled of
slumber by the pains and discomforts of this worn and feeble frame, I
almost wish I could purchase the rude health of the peasant by the
exchange of an idle and imperfect learning for the ignorance, content
with the narrow world it possesses, because unconscious of the limitless
creation beyond. Yet, my dear and esteemed friend, there is a dignified
and tranquillizing philosophy in the writings of the ancients which ought
to teach me a better condition of mind; and when I have risen from the
lofty, albeit, somewhat melancholy strain, which swells through the
essays of the graceful and tender Cicero, I have indeed felt a momentary
satisfaction at my studies, and an elation even at the petty success with
which I have cherished them. But these are brief and fleeting moments,
and deserve chastisement for their pride. There is one thing, my Pelham,
which has grieved me bitterly of late, and that is, that in the earnest
attention which it is the--perhaps fastidious--custom of our University,
to pay to the minutiae of classic lore, I do now oftentimes lose the
spirit and beauty of the general bearing; nay, I derive a far greater
pleasure from the ingenious amendment of a perverted text, than from all
the turn and thought of the sense itself: while I am straightening a
crooked nail in the wine-cask, I suffer the wine to evaporate; but to
this I am somewhat reconciled, when I reflect that it was also the