those who undervalue as those who overestimate its importance; ruining
virtues in the spendthrift no less than engendering vices in the miser.
But when I half implied my farewell to the character of a novelist, I had
imagined that this conception might be best worked out upon the stage.
After some unpublished and imperfect attempts towards so realizing my
design, I found either that the subject was too wide for the limits of
the Drama, or that I wanted that faculty of concentration which alone
enables the dramatist to compress multiform varieties into a very limited
compass. With this design, I desired to unite some exhibition of what
seems to me a principal vice in the hot and emulous chase for happiness
or fame, fortune or knowledge, which is almost synonymous with the cant
phrase of "the March of Intellect," in that crisis of society to which we
have arrived. The vice I allude to is Impatience. That eager desire to
press forward, not so much to conquer obstacles as to elude them; that
gambling with the solemn destinies of life, seeking ever to set success
upon the chance of a die; that hastening from the wish conceived to the
end accomplished; that thirst after quick returns to ingenious toil, and
breathless spurrings along short cuts to the goal, which we see
everywhere around us, from the Mechanics' Institute to the Stock Market,-
-beginning in education with the primers of infancy, deluging us with
"Philosophies for the Million" and "Sciences made Easy;" characterizing
the books of our writers, the speeches of our statesmen, no less than the
dealings of our speculators,--seem, I confess, to me to constitute a very
diseased and very general symptom of the times. I hold that the greatest
friend to man is labour; that knowledge without toil, if possible, were
worthless; that toil in pursuit of knowledge is the best knowledge we can
attain; that the continuous effort for fame is nobler than fame itself;
that it is not wealth suddenly acquired which is deserving of homage, but
the virtues which a man exercises in the slow pursuit of wealth,--the
abilities so called forth, the self-denials so imposed; in a word, that