Hard bonds
are offered you to sign; as it were, a solemn engagement to constitute
yourself an impostor, before ever entering; to declare your belief
in incredibilities,--your determination, in short, to take Chaos for
Cosmos, and Satan for the Lord of things, if he come with money in his
pockets, and horsehair and bombazine decently wrapt about him. Fatal
preliminaries, which deter many an ingenuous young soul, and send him
back from the threshold, and I hope will deter ever more. But if you do
enter, the condition is well known: "Talk; who can talk best here? His
shall be the mouth of gold, and the purse of gold; and with my [Gr.]
_mitra_ (once the head-dress of unfortunate females, I am told) shall
his sacred temples be begirt."

Ingenuous souls, unless forced to it, do now much shudder at the
threshold of both these careers, and not a few desperately turn back
into the wilderness rather, to front a very rude fortune, and be
devoured by wild beasts as is likeliest. But as to Parliament, again,
and its eligibility if attainable, there is yet no question anywhere;
the ingenuous soul, if possessed of money-capital enough, is predestined
by the parental and all manner of monitors to that career of talk; and
accepts it with alacrity and clearness of heart, doubtful only whether
he shall be _able_ to make a speech. Courage, my brave young fellow. If
you can climb a soaped pole of any kind, you will certainly be able to
make a speech. All mortals have a tongue; and carry on some jumble,
if not of thought, yet of stuff which they could talk. The weakest of
animals has got a cry in it, and can give voice before dying. If you are
tough enough, bent upon it desperately enough, I engage you shall make
a speech;--but whether that will be the way to Heaven for you, I do not
engage.

These, then, are our two careers for genius: mute Industrialism, which
can seldom become very human, but remains beaverish mainly: and the
three Professions named learned,--that is to say, able to talk. For the
heroic or higher kinds of human intellect, in the silent state, there is
not the smallest inquiry anywhere; apparently a thing not wanted in this
country at present. What the supply may be, I cannot inform M'Croudy;
but the market-demand, he may himself see, is _nil_. These are our three
professions that require human intellect in part or whole, not able to
do with mere beaverish; and such a part does the gift of talk play in
one and all of th