their own sense of honour, or by
the opportunities afforded them of supremacy and independent action.
Michael the impulsive saw and felt this most acutely, and took occasion,
from their eagerness, to insure a proper equilibrium of the forces
before permitting them to coalesce. There lived in the same city with
Michael, and within a quarter of a mile of the banking-house, an
individual to whom he turned his thoughts in his emergency. Mr Planner
was his name, and his character is worth more than a mere passing
observation. He was a study for an artist--a lesson for mankind. He was
a man of surprising abilities, ill directed, and badly educated; at any
period of his life capable of any thing--to the last moment of his
existence accomplishing nothing. From a child he had displayed a love of
admiration and applause, a craving after superiority and distinction, a
burning ambition for fame. He had the body of a giant, and a giant's
mental apparatus. But with all his gifts, physical and spiritual, all
his energies and aims, he arrived at middle life a melancholy spectacle
of failure and incompetency. There was no one object which he could
pursue with steadiness and patience--no single mark to which he could
perseveringly apply the combined powers of his gifted intellect. He
frittered his faculties upon a hundred trifles, never concentrated them
upon a worthy purpose once. Pride, emulation, and the internal
consciousness of strength, led him, year after year, and day after day,
into difficulties and trials, and carried him through them only to drag
him into deeper. There was no one man whom he would allow to perform any
one thing so skilfully as himself. There was no branch of knowledge into
which he did not grope his way, and from which he would not manage to
extract sufficient learning to render his conceit intolerable, and his
opposition dangerous to a more erudite antagonist. He could build a
church--dam a river--form a company--warm a house--cool a room--one and
all he would undertake at a minute's notice, and engage to execute
better than any person living. He asserted it with confidence, and you
believed him when he spoke with all the earnestness of self-conviction
and of truth. He despised all works--all theories but his own; and these
were unapproachable, inimitable. He wrote with his own invented pen,
used his own ink, sat on his own chair, made with his own incomparable
tools. Men were ignorant, behind their age--burde