Maltravers now enjoy. In utter solitude, so far as familiar
companionship is concerned, he had for several weeks been making himself
acquainted with his own character and mind. He read and thought much,
but without any exact or defined object. I think it is Montaigne who
says somewhere: "People talk about thinking--but for my part I never
think, except when I sit down to write." I believe this is not a very
common case, for people who don't write think as well as people who do;
but connected, severe, well-developed thought, in contradistinction to
vague meditation, must be connected with some tangible plan or object;
and therefore we must be either writing men or acting men, if we desire
to test the logic, and unfold into symmetrical design the fused colours
of our reasoning faculty. Maltravers did not yet feel this, but he was
sensible of some intellectual want. His ideas, his memories, his dreams
crowded thick and confused upon him; he wished to arrange them in order,
and he could not. He was overpowered by the unorganised affluence of his
own imagination and intellect. He had often, even as a child, fancied
that he was formed to do something in the world, but he had never
steadily considered what it was to be, whether he was to become a man of
books or a man of deeds. He had written poetry when it poured
irresistibly from the fount of emotion within, but looked at his
effusions with a cold and neglectful eye when the enthusiasm had passed
away.

Maltravers was not much gnawed by the desire of fame--perhaps few men of
real genius are, until artificially worked up to it. There is in a
sound and correct intellect, with all its gifts fairly balanced, a calm
consciousness of power, a certainty that when its strength is fairly put
out, it must be to realise the usual result of strength. Men of
second-rate faculties, on the contrary, are fretful and nervous,
fidgeting after a celebrity which they do not estimate by their own