a girl that crazed our hearts,
blossomed into the spouse of Jenkins, the stockbroker, and is now a
grandmother. Not at all. She is Juliet leaning from the balcony, or
Portia talking on the moonlight lawns at Belmont. There walk the
shadows of our former selves. All that Time steals he takes thither;
and to live in that world is to live in our lost youth, our lost
generosities, illusions, and romances.

In middle-class life, and in the professions, when a standard or ideal
is tacitly set up, to which every member is expected to conform on pain
of having himself talked about, and wise heads shaken over him, the
quick feelings of the vagabond are not frequently found. Yet, thanks
to Nature, who sends her leafage and flowerage up through all kinds of
_debris_, and who takes a blossomy possession of ruined walls and
desert places, it is never altogether dead! And of vagabonds, not the
least delightful is he who retains poetry and boyish spirits beneath
the crust of a profession. Mr. Carlyle commends "central fire," and
very properly commends it most when "well covered in." In the case of
a professional man, this "central fire" does not manifest itself in
wasteful explosiveness, but in secret genial heat, visible in fruits of
charity and pleasant humour. The physician who is a humourist commends
himself doubly to a sick-bed. His patients are as much indebted for
their cure to his smile, his voice, and a certain irresistible
healthfulness that surrounds him, as they are to his skill and his
prescriptions. The lawyer who is a humourist is a man of ten thousand.
How easily the worldly-wise face, puckered over a stiff brief, relaxes
into the lines of laughter. He sees many an evil side of human nature,
he is familiar with slanders and injustice, all kinds of human
bitterness and falsity; but neither his hand nor his heart becomes
"imbued with that it works in," and the little admixture of acid,
inevitable from his circumstances and mode of life, but heightens the
flavour of his humour. But of all humourists of the professional
class, I prefer the clergyman, especially if he is well stricken in
years, and has been anchored all his life in a country charge. He is
none of your loud wits. There is a lady-like delicacy in his mind, a
constant sense of his holy office, which warn him off dangerous
subjects. This reserve, however, does but improve the quality of his
mirth. What his humour loses in boldness, it gains in