onal occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand
still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they CANNOT be idle, their
nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill.

*****

If a person cannot be happy without remaining idle, idle he should
remain. It is a revolutionary precept; but thanks to hunger and the
workhouse, one not easily to be abused; and within practical limits, it
is one of the most incontestable truths in the whole Body of Morality.
Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment, I beseech you. He
sows hurry and reaps indigestion; he puts a vast deal of activity out to
interest, and receives a large measure of nervous derangement in return.
Either he absents himself entirely from all fellowship, and lives a
recluse in a garret, with carpet slippers and a leaden inkpot; or he
comes among people swiftly and bitterly, in a contraction of his whole
nervous system, to discharge some temper before he returns to work. I do
not care how much or how well he works, this fellow is an evil feature
in other people's lives. They would be happier if he were dead.

*****

'We are all employed in commerce during the day; but in the evening,
VOYEZ-VOUS, NOUS SOMMES SERIEUX.' These were the words. They were all
employed over the frivolous mercantile concerns of Belgium during the
day; but in the evening they found some hours for the serious concerns
of life. I may have a wrong idea of wisdom, but I think that was a very
wise remark. People connected with literature and philosophy are
busy all their days in getting rid of second-hand notions and false
standards. It is their profession, in the sweat of their brows,
by dogged thinking, to recover their old fresh view of life, and
distinguish what they really and originally like from what they have
only learned to tolerate perforce. And these Royal Nautical Sportsmen
had the distinction still quite legible in their hearts. They had still
those clean perceptions of what is nice and nasty, what is interesting
and what is dull, which envious old gentlemen refer t