this arrangement,
his fortune was secured, and he might ride in his carriage before he was
thirty. If, on the other hand, he really chose to fling away a fortune,
he should not be pinched for means to carry on his studies as a painter.
The interest of his inheritance on his father's death, should be paid
quarterly to him during his father's lifetime: the annual independence
thus secured to the young artist, under any circumstances, being
calculated as amounting to a little over four hundred pounds a year.

Valentine was not deficient in gratitude. He took a day to consider
what he should do, though his mind was quite made up about his choice
beforehand; and then persisted in his first determination; throwing away
the present certainty of becoming a wealthy man, for the sake of the
future chance of turning out a great painter.

If he had really possessed genius, there would have been nothing very
remarkable in this part of his history, so far; but having nothing of
the kind, holding not the smallest spark of the great creative fire
in his whole mental composition, surely there was something very
discouraging to contemplate, in the spectacle of a man resolutely
determining, in spite of adverse home circumstances and strong home
temptation, to abandon all those paths in life, along which he might
have walked fairly abreast with his fellows, for the one path in which
he was predestinated by Nature to be always left behind by the way. Do
the announcing angels, whose mission it is to whisper of greatness
to great spirits, ever catch the infection of fallibility from their
intercourse with mortals? Do the voices which said truly to Shakespeare,
to Raphael, and to Mozart, in their youth-time,--You are chosen to
be gods in this world--ever speak wrongly to souls which they are
not ordained to approach? It may be so. There are men enough in all
countries whose lives would seem to prove it--whose deaths have not
contradicted it.

But even to victims such as these, there are pleasant resting-places on
the thorny way, and flashes of sunlight now and then, to make the
cloudy prospect beautiful, though only for a little while. It is not all
misfortune and disappointment to the man who is mentally unworthy of a
great intellectual vocation, so long as he is morally worthy of it; so
long as he can pursue it honestly, patiently, and affectionately, for
its own dear sake. Let him work, though ever so obscurely, in this
spirit towards hi