he had
better not desert his honest toil in pursuit of the poet's bays. This,
it must be confessed, was a rather discouraging case. A young person
like this may pierce, as the Frenchmen say, by and by, but the chances
are all the other way.

I advise aimless young men to choose some profession without needless
delay, and so get into a good strong current of human affairs, and
find themselves bound up in interests with a compact body of their
fellow-men.

I advise young women who write to me for counsel,--perhaps I do not
advise them at all, only sympathize a little with them, and listen to
what they have to say (eight closely written pages on the average, which
I always read from beginning to end, thinking of the widow's cruse and
myself in the character of Elijah) and--and--come now, I don't believe
Methuselah would tell you what he said in his letters to young ladies,
written when he was in his nine hundred and sixty-ninth year.

But, dear me! how much work all this private criticism involves! An
editor has only to say "respectfully declined," and there is the end of
it. But the confidential adviser is expected to give the reasons of his
likes and dislikes in detail, and sometimes to enter into an argument
for their support. That is more than any martyr can stand, but what
trials he must go through, as it is! Great bundles of manuscripts, verse
or prose, which the recipient is expected to read, perhaps to recommend
to a publisher, at any rate to express a well-digested and agreeably
flavored opinion about; which opinion, nine times out of ten, disguise
it as we may, has to be a bitter draught; every form of egotism,
conceit, false sentiment, hunger for notoriety, and eagerness for
display of anserine plumage before the admiring public;--all these come
in by mail or express, covered with postage-stamps of so much more cost
than the value of the waste words they overlie, that one comes at last
to groan and change color at the very sight of a package, and to dread
the postman's knock as if it were that of the other visitor whose naked
knuckles rap at every door.

Still there are experiences which go far towards repaying all these
inflictions. My last young man's case looked desperate enough; some of
his sails had blown from the rigging, some were backing in the wind, and
some were flapping and shivering, but I told him which way to head, and
to my surprise he promised to do just as I directed, and I do not doubt
is