lf a proof of the fact, for nothing could be
less fruitful than such a speculation, terminating in such a way. He was
perfectly aware that he cared a great deal for the theory, and so his
visitors must have thought when they found him, with one of his long
legs twisted round the other, reading a volume of De Tocqueville. That
was the land of reading he liked; he had thought a great deal about
social and economical questions, forms of government and the happiness
of peoples. The convictions he had arrived at were not such as mix
gracefully with the time-honoured verities a young lawyer looking out
for business is in the habit of taking for granted; but he had to
reflect that these doctrines would probably not contribute any more to
his prosperity in Mississippi than in New York. Indeed, he scarcely
could think of the country where they would be a particular advantage to
him. It came home to him that his opinions were stiff, whereas in
comparison his effort was lax; and he accordingly began to wonder
whether he might not make a living by his opinions. He had always had a
desire for public life; to cause one's ideas to be embodied in national
conduct appeared to him the highest form of human enjoyment. But there
was little enough that was public in his solitary studies, and he asked
himself what was the use of his having an office at all, and why he
might not as well carry on his profession at the Astor Library, where,
in his spare hours and on chance holidays, he did an immense deal of
suggestive reading. He took copious notes and memoranda, and these
things sometimes shaped themselves in a way that might possibly commend
them to the editors of periodicals. Readers perhaps would come, if
clients didn't; so he produced, with a great deal of labour,
half-a-dozen articles, from which, when they were finished, it seemed to
him that he had omitted all the points he wished most to make, and
addressed them to the powers that preside over weekly and monthly
publications. They were all declined with thanks, and he would have been
forced to believe that the accent of his languid clime brought him luck
as little under the pen as on the lips, had not another explanation been
suggested by one of the more explicit of his oracles, in relation to a
paper on the rights of minorities. This gentleman pointed out that his
doctrines were about three hundred years behind the age; doubtless some
magazine of the sixteenth century would have been v