s labor, and he shall find the labor itself its own
exceeding great reward. In that reward lives the divine consolation,
which, though Fame turn her back on him contemptuously, and Affluence
pass over unpitying to the other side of the way, shall still pour
oil upon all his wounds, and take him quietly and tenderly to the hard
journey's end. To this one exhaustless solace, which the work, no matter
of what degree, can yield always to earnest workers, the man who has
succeeded, and the man who has failed, can turn alike, as to a common
mother--the one, for refuge from mean envy and slanderous hatred, from
all the sorest evils which even the thriving child of Fame is heir to;
the other, from neglect, from ridicule, from defeat, from all the petty
tyrannies which the pining bondman of Obscurity is fated to undergo.

Thus it was with Valentine. He had sacrificed a fortune to his Art;
and his Art--in the world's eye at least--had given to him nothing
in return. Friends and relatives who had not scrupled, on being made
acquainted with his choice of a vocation, to call it in question,
and thereby to commit that worst and most universal of all human
impertinences, which consists of telling a man to his face, by the
plainest possible inference, that others are better able than he is
himself to judge what calling in life is fittest and worthiest for
him--friends and relatives who thus upbraided Valentine for his refusal
to accept the partnership in his uncle's house, affected, on discovering
that he made no public progress whatever in Art, to believe that he was
simply an idle fellow, who knew that his father's liberality placed him
beyond the necessity of working for his bread, and who had taken up the
pursuit of painting as a mere amateur amusement to occupy his leisure
hours. To a man who labored like poor Blyth, with the steadiest industry
and the highest aspirations, such whispered calumnies as these were of
all mortifications the most cruel, of all earthly insults the hardest to
bear.

Still he worked on patiently, never losing faith or hope, because
he never lost the love of his Art, or the enjoyment of pursuing it,
irrespective of results, however disheartening. Like most other men of
his slight intellectual caliber, the works he produced were various, if
nothing else. He tried the florid style, and the severe style; he was by
turns devotional, allegorical, historical, sentimental, humorous. At one
time, he abandoned fig