LETTER FROM PISISTRATUS CAXTON, TO ALBERT TREVANION, ESQ., M. P.
(_The confession of a youth who, in the Old World, finds himself one too many._)
"My dear Mr Trevanion,--I thank you cordially, and so we do all, for your reply to my letter, informing you of the villanous traps through which we have passed not indeed with whole skins, but still whole in life and limb--which considering that the traps were three, and the teeth sharp, was more than we could reasonably expect. We have taken to the wastes, like wise foxes as we are, and I do not think a bait can be found that will again snare the fox paternal. As for the fox filial, it is different, and I am about to prove to you that he is burning to redeem the family disgrace. Ah! my dear Mr Trevanion, if you are busy with 'blue books' when this letter reaches you, stop here, and put it aside for some rare moment of leisure. I am about to open my heart to you, and ask you, who know the world so well, to aid me in an escape from those _flammantia mænia_, wherewith I find that world begirt and enclosed. For look you, sir, you and my father were right when you both agreed that the mere book life was not meant for me. And yet what is not book life, to a young man who would make his way through the ordinary and conventional paths to fortune? All the professions are so book-lined, book-hemmed, book-choked, that wherever these strong hands of mine stretch towards action, they find themselves met by octavo ramparts, flanked with quarto crenellations. For first, this college life, opening to scholarships, and ending, perchance, as you political economists would desire, in Malthusian fellowships--premiums for celibacy--consider what manner of thing it is!
"Three years, book upon book,--a great Dead Sea before one, three years long, and all the apples that grow on the shore full of the ashes of pica and primer! Those three years ended, the fellowship, it may be, won,--still books--books--if the whole world does not close at the college gates. Do I, from scholar, effloresce into literary man, author by profession?--books--books! Do I go into the law?--books--books. _Ars longa, vita brevis_, which, paraphrased, means that it is slow work before one fags one's way to a brief! Do I turn doctor? Why, what but books can kill time, until, at the age of forty, a lucky chance may permit me to kill something else? The church? (for which, indeed, I don't profess to be good enough,)--that is book life _par excellence_, whether, inglorious and poor, I wander through long lines of divines and fathers; or, ambitious of bishopricks, I amend the corruptions, not of the human heart, but of a Greek text, and through defiles of scholiasts and commentators win my way to the See. In short, barring the noble profession of arms--which you know, after all, is not precisely the road to fortune--can you tell me any means by which one may escape these eternal books, this mental clockwork, and corporeal lethargy. Where can this passion for life that runs riot through my veins find its vent? Where can these stalwart limbs, and this broad chest, grow of value and worth, in this hot-bed of cerebral inflammation and dyspeptic intellect? I know what is in me; I know I have the qualities that should go with stalwart limbs and broad chest. I have some plain common sense, some promptitude and keenness, some pleasure in hardy danger, some fortitude in bearing pain--qualities for which I bless Heaven, for they are qualities good and useful in private life. But in the forum of men, in the market of fortune, are they not _flocci, nauci, nihili_?