rative
profession, and labour therein with something not far short of
enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party who are content when they have
enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little
of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so
called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great
deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has
as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted
that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap
race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for
those who do. A fine fellow (as we see so many) takes his determination,
votes for the sixpences, and in the emphatic Americanism, "goes for"
them. And while such an one is ploughing distressfully up the road, it
is not hard to understand his resentment when he perceives cool persons
in the meadows by the wayside, lying with a handkerchief over their ears
and a glass at their elbow. Alexander is touched in a very delicate
place by the disregard of Diogenes. Where was the glory of having taken
Rome for those tumultuous barbarians, who poured into the Senate house,
and found the Fathers sitting silent and unmoved by their success? It
is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops,
and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement.
Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a
superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary
persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to
disparage those who have none.

But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the
greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry,
but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest
difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to
remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously
argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said
against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. To
state one argument is not necessarily to be deaf to all others, and that
a man has written a book of travels in Montenegro is no reason why he
should never have been to Richmond.

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from sc