n?
Men may become too refined and too fastidious for useful purposes; and
nowhere can they become so more rapidly than in Italy. My dear Ernest,
I know you well; you are not made to sink down into a virtuoso, with a
cabinet full of cameos and a head full of pictures; still less are you
made to be an indolent _cicisbeo_ to some fair Italian, with one passion
and two ideas: and yet I have known men as clever as you, whom that
bewitching Italy has sunk into one or other of these insignificant
beings. Don't run away with the notion that you have plenty of time
before you. You have no such thing. At your age, and with your fortune
(I wish you were not so rich), the holiday of one year becomes the
custom of the next. In England, to be a useful or a distinguished man,
you must labour. Now, labour itself is sweet, if we take to it early.
We are a hard race, but we are a manly one; and our stage is the most
exciting in Europe for an able and an honest ambition. Perhaps you will
tell me you are not ambitious now; very possibly--but ambitious you
will be; and, believe me, there is no unhappier wretch than a man who is
ambitious but disappointed,--who has the desire for fame, but has lost
the power to achieve it--who longs for the goal, but will not, and
cannot, put away his slippers to walk to it. What I most fear for you is
one of these two evils--an early marriage or a fatal _liaison_ with some
married woman. The first evil is certainly the least, but for you it
would still be a great one. With your sensitive romance, with your
morbid cravings for the ideal, domestic happiness would soon grow trite
and dull. You would demand new excitement, and become a restless and
disgusted man. It is necessary for you to get rid of all the false fever
of life, before you settle down to everlasting ties. You do not yet
know your own mind; you would choose your partner from some visionary
caprice, or momentary impulse, and not from the deep and accurate
knowledge of those qualities which would most harmonize with your own
character. People, to live happily with each other, must _fit in_, as it
were--the proud be mated with the meek, the irritable with the gentle,
and so forth. No, my dear Maltravers, do not think of marriage yet a
while; and if there is any danger of it, come over to me immediately.
But if I warn you against a lawful tie, how much more against an illicit
one? You are precisely at the age, and of the disposition, which render
the