re limited
or more pleasant kind. There are few such prisons in which a young
man of energy and a brave heart can be placed, in which he will not
gain more by taking kindly to his work, and looking well about him,
than by wasting himself in convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but
learn to think of his prison as a school, there is good hope of his
ultimately getting out of it. Were a butcher's boy to ask us--you
will not deem the illustration too low, for you will remember that
Henry Kirke White was once a butcher's boy--were he to ask us how
we thought he could best escape from his miserable employment, we
would at once say, You have rare opportunities of observation; you
may be a butcher's boy in body, but in mind you may become an adept
in one of the profoundest of the sciences, that of comparative
anatomy;--think of yourself as not in a prison, but in a school,
and there is no fear but you will rise. There is another delusion
of that "natural drunkenness" referred to, against which you must
also be warned. Never sacrifice your independence to a phantom. We
have seen young men utterly ruin themselves through the vain belief
that they were too good for their work. They were mostly lads of a
literary turn, who had got a knack of versifying, and who, in the
fond belief that they were poets and men of genius, and that poets
and men of genius should be above the soil and drudgery of mechanical
labour, gave up the profession by which they had lived, poorly
mayhap, but independently, and got none other to set in its place.
A mistake of this character is always a fatal one; and we trust
all of you will ever remember, that though a man may think himself
above his work, no man _is_, or no man ought to think himself, above
the high dignity of being independent. In truth, he is but a sorry,
weak fellow who measures himself by the conventional status of the
labour by which he lives. Our great poet formed a correcter estimate:

"What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, and a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that."

There is another advice which we would fain give you, though it may be
regarded as of a somewhat equivocal kind: Rely upon yourselves. The
man who sets his hopes upon patronage, or the exertions of others in
his behalf, is never so respectable a man, and, save in very
occasional instances, rarely so _lucky_ a man, as he who bends his
exer