future is invested in that tranquillity and order of a State in which
talent and action and industry are a certain capital,--why, Messrs.
Coutts, the great bankers, had better encourage a theory to upset the
system of banking! Whatever disturbs society, yea, even by a causeless
panic, much more by an actual struggle, falls first upon the market of
labour, and thence affects prejudicially every department of
intelligence. In such times the arts are arrested; literature is
neglected; people are too busy to read anything save appeals to their
passions. And capital, shaken in its sense of security, no longer
ventures boldly through the land, calling forth all the energies of toil
and enterprise, and extending to every workman his reward. Now, Lenny,
take this piece of advice. You are young, clever, and aspiring: men
rarely succeed in changing the world; but a man seldom fails of success
if he lets the world alone, and resolves to make the best of it. You are
in the midst of the great crisis of your life; it is the struggle between
the new desires knowledge excites, and that sense of poverty which those
desires convert either into hope and emulation, or into envy and despair.
I grant that it is an up-hill work that lies before you; but don't you
think it is always easier to climb a mountain than it is to level it?
These books call on you to level the mountain; and that mountain is the
property of other people, subdivided amongst a great many proprietors,
and protected by law. At the first stroke of the pickaxe, it is ten to
one but what you are taken up for a trespass. But the path up the
mountain is a right of way uncontested. You may be safe at the summit,
before (even if the owners are fools enough to let you) you could
have levelled a yard. Cospetto!" quoth the doctor, "it is more than two
thousand years ago since poor Plato began to level it, and the mountain
is as high as ever!"

Thus saying, Riccabocca came to the end of his pipe, and stalking