disdainful and fatigued. So much had he already learned, that books
taught him little that he did not already know. And the biographies of
authors, those ghost-like beings who seem to have had no life but in the
shadow of their own haunting and imperishable thoughts, dimmed the
inspiration he might have caught from their pages. Those slaves of the
Lamp, those Silkworms of the Closet, how little had they enjoyed, how
little had they lived! Condemned to a mysterious fate by the wholesale
destinies of the world, they seemed born but to toil and to spin
thoughts for the common crowd--and, their task performed in drudgery and
in darkness, to die when no further service could be wrung from their
exhaustion. Names had they been in life, and as names they lived for
ever, in life as in death, airy and unsubstantial phantoms. It pleased
Maltravers at this time to turn a curious eye towards the obscure and
half-extinct philosophies of the ancient world. He compared the Stoics
with the Epicureans--those Epicureans who had given their own version to
the simple and abstemious utilitarianism of their master. He asked
which was the wiser, to sharpen pain or to deaden pleasure--to bear all
or to enjoy all; and, by a natural reaction which often happens to us in
life, this man, hitherto so earnest, active-spirited, and resolved on
great things, began to yearn for the drowsy pleasures of indolence. The
garden grew more tempting than the porch. He seriously revolved the old
alternative of the Grecian demi-god--might it not be wiser to abandon
the grave pursuits to which he had been addicted, to dethrone the august
but severe ideal in his heart, to cultivate the light loves and
voluptuous trifles of the herd, and to plant the brief space of youth
yet left to him with the myrtle and the rose? As water flows over
water, so new schemes rolled upon new--sweeping away every momentary
impression, and leaving the surface facile equally to receive and to
forget. Such is the common state with men of imagination in those
crises of life, when some great revolution of designs and hopes