morbid irritability of his boyish pride; but the high spirit, the
generous love of independence, the scorn of mercenary calculation, were
strong as ever; these were in the grain of his nature. In common with
all who in youth aspire to be one day noted from the "undistinguishable
many," Lionel had formed to himself a certain ideal standard, above the
ordinary level of what the world is contented to call honest, or esteem
clever. He admitted into his estimate of life the heroic element, not
undesirable even in the most practical point of view, for the world is
so in the habit of decrying; of disbelieving in high motives and pure
emotions; of daguerreotyping itself with all its ugliest wrinkles,
stripped of the true bloom that brightens, of the true expression that
redeems, those defects which it invites the sun to limn, that we shall
never judge human nature aright, if we do not set out in life with our
gaze on its fairest beauties, and our belief in its latent good. In a
word we should begin with the Heroic, if we would learn the Human. But
though to himself Lionel thus secretly prescribed a certain superiority
of type, to be sedulously aimed at, even if never actually attained, he
was wholly without pedantry and arrogance towards his own contemporaries.
From this he was saved not only by good-nature, animal spirits, frank
hardihood, but by the very affluence of ideas which animated his tongue,
coloured his language, and whether to young or old, wise or dull, made
his conversation racy and original. He was a delightful companion; and
if he had taken much instruction from those older and wiser than himself,
he so bathed that instruction in the fresh fountain of his own lively
intelligence, so warmed it at his own beating impulsive heart, that he
could make an old man's gleanings from experience seem a young man's
guesses into truth. Faults he had, of course,--chiefly the faults common
at his age; amongst them, perhaps, the most dangerous were,--firstly,
carelessness in money matters; secondly, a distaste for advice in which
prudence was visibly predominant. His tastes were not in reality