misdirection of youth, all that constitutes the spirit, the power, the
charm of youth is extinguished. The young man becomes prematurely old.
We have all witnessed that saddest of spectacles, the petulant child
developing into the ruffian boy, and hurrying into the ruffian
man,--rude, hard-natured, swaggering, and self-willed, a darkness over
his conscience, a glare over his appetites, insensible to duty or
affection, and only tamed into decencies by the chains of restraint
which an outraged community binds on his impulses. Now give this young
savage arbitrary power, let him inherit the empire of the world, remove
all restraints on his will, and allow him to riot in the mad caprices of
sensuality and malevolence, and he makes his ominous appearance in
history as a Caligula, a Domitian, a Nero. More fit for a madhouse than
a throne, his advent is the signal of a despotism controlled by no
guiding principles, but given over to that spirit of freak and mischief
which springs from the union of the boy's brain with the man's
appetites; and his fate is to have that craze of the faculties and
delirium of the sensations which he calls his life abruptly closed by
suicide or assassination: by suicide, when he has become intolerable to
himself; by assassination, when, as is more common, he has become
intolerable to the world. Evil, however, as history shows him, it must
still be said that his career does not exhibit the consistent depravity
and systematic wickedness which characterize some of the Roman Emperors
of maturer years; and even the giddy ferocities of the youthful Nero can
be contemplated with less horror than the Satanic depth of malignity
which morosely brooded over shadowy plans of gigantic crime in the dark
spirit of the aged Tiberius.

This ruffian type of the young man is rarely exhibited on the historical
theatre in its full combination of animal fury with mental feebleness.
In most young men who acquire prominence in the history of the world
there is some genius, however dashed it may be with depravity; and
genius is itself an inlet of youth, checks the downward drag of the
spiritual into the animal nature, intensifies appetites into passions,
and lends impetus to daring ambition, if it does not always purify the
motives which prompt its exercise. This genius divorced from wisdom,
scornful of moral obligations, and ravenous for notoriety, is especially
marked by wilfulness, presumptuous self-assertion, the curse