divine consolation, which, though Fame turn her back on him
contemptuously, and Affluence pass over unpitying to the other side of
the way, shall still pour oil upon all his wounds, and take him quietly
and tenderly to the hard journey's end. To this one exhaustless solace,
which the work, no matter of what degree, can yield always to earnest
workers, the man who has succeeded, and the man who has failed, can
turn alike, as to a common mother--the one, for refuge from mean envy
and slanderous hatred, from all the sorest evils which even the
thriving child of Fame is heir to; the other, from neglect, from
ridicule, from defeat, from all the petty tyrannies which the pining
bondman of Obscurity is fated to undergo.

Thus it was with Valentine. He had sacrificed a fortune to his Art; and
his Art--in the world's eye at least--had given to him nothing in
return. Friends and relatives who had not scrupled, on being made
acquainted with his choice of a vocation, to call it in question, and
thereby to commit that worst and most universal of all human
impertinences, which consists of telling a man to his face, by the
plainest possible inference, that others are better able than he is
himself to judge what calling in life is fittest and worthiest for
him--friends and relatives who thus upbraided Valentine for his refusal
to accept the partnership in his uncle's house, affected, on
discovering that he made no public progress whatever in Art, to believe
that he was simply an idle fellow, who knew that his father's
liberality placed him beyond the necessity of working for his bread,
and who had taken up the pursuit of painting as a mere amateur
amusement to occupy his leisure hours. To a man who labored like poor
Blyth, with the steadiest industry and the highest aspirations, such
whispered calumnies as these were of all mortifications the most cruel,
of all earthly insults the hardest to bear.