road traits or prevalent infirmities their characters possessed.
In this, indeed, he differed from the scholar tribe, and even in
abstraction was mechanically vigilant and observant. Much in his nature
would, had early circumstances given it a different bias, have fitted
him for worldly superiority and command. A resistless energy, an
unbroken perseverance, a profound and scheming and subtle thought, a
genius fertile in resources, a tongue clothed with eloquence, all, had
his ambition so chosen, might have given him the same empire over the
physical, that he had now attained over the intellectual world. It could
not be said that Aram wanted benevolence, but it was dashed, and mixed
with a certain scorn: the benevolence was the offspring of his nature;
the scorn seemed the result of his pursuits. He would feed the birds
from his window, he would tread aside to avoid the worm on his path;
were one of his own tribe in danger, he would save him at the hazard of
his life:--yet in his heart he despised men, and believed them beyond
amelioration. Unlike the present race of schoolmen, who incline to the
consoling hope of human perfectibility, he saw in the gloomy past but a
dark prophecy of the future. As Napoleon wept over one wounded soldier
in the field of battle, yet ordered without emotion, thousands to a
certain death; so Aram would have sacrificed himself for an individual,
but would not have sacrificed a momentary gratification for his race.
And this sentiment towards men, at once of high disdain and profound
despondency, was perhaps the cause why he rioted in indolence upon his
extraordinary mental wealth, and could not be persuaded either to dazzle
the world or to serve it. But by little and little his fame had broke
forth from the limits with which he would have walled it: a man who had
taught himself, under singular difficulties, nearly all the languages
of the civilized earth; the profound mathematician, the elaborate
antiquarian, the abstruse philologist, uniting with his graver lore the
more florid accomplishments of science, from the scholastic trifling
of heraldry to the gentle learning of herbs and flowers, could scarcely
hope for utter obscurity in that day when all intellectual acquirement
was held in high honour, and its possessors were drawn together into a
sort of brotherhood by the fellowship of their pursuits. And though
Aram gave little or nothing to the world himself, he was ever willing
to communicate