net or gosling.

Perhaps, too, what little employment he had was performed ill, at best
unpleasantly. "Great practical method and expertness" he may brag of;
but is there not also great practical pride, though deep-hidden, only
the deeper-seated? So shy a man can never have been popular. We figure
to ourselves, how in those days he may have played strange freaks with
his independence, and so forth: do not his own words betoken as much?
"Like a very young person, I imagined it was with Work alone, and not
also with Folly and Sin, in myself and others, that I had been
appointed to struggle." Be this as it may, his progress from the passive
Auscultatorship, towards any active Assessorship, is evidently of the
slowest. By degrees, those same established men, once partially inclined
to patronize him, seem to withdraw their countenance, and give him up
as "a man of genius" against which procedure he, in these Papers, loudly
protests. "As if," says he, "the higher did not presuppose the lower; as
if he who can fly into heaven, could not also walk post if he resolved
on it! But the world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing
for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust
nothing but the common copper."

How our winged sky-messenger, unaccepted as a terrestrial runner,
contrived, in the mean while, to keep himself from flying skyward
without return, is not too clear from these Documents. Good old Gretchen
seems to have vanished from the scene, perhaps from the Earth; other
Horn of Plenty, or even of Parsimony, nowhere flows for him; so that
"the prompt nature of Hunger being well known," we are not without our
anxiety. From private Tuition, in never so many languages and sciences,
the aid derivable is small; neither, to use his own words, "does the
young Adventurer hitherto suspect in himself any literary gift; but at
best earns bread-and-water wages, by his wide faculty of Translation.
Nevertheless," continues he, "that I subsisted is clear, for you find me
even now alive." Which fact, however, except upon the principle of our
true-hearted, kind old Proverb, that "there is always life for a living
one," we must profess ourselves unable to explain.

Certain Landlords' Bills, and other economic Documents, bearing the
mark of Settlement, indicate that he was not without money; but, like an
independent Hearth-holder, if not House-holder, paid his way. Here also
occur, among many others, two lit