ed to England; the wounds of the past had
not disappeared, but they were scarred over; and I longed, like the rest
of my species, to have an object in view. At that age, if we have seen
much of mankind and possess the talents to profit by our knowledge, we
must be one of two sects,--a politician or a philosopher. My time was
not yet arrived for the latter, so I resolved to become the former; but
this was denied me, for my vanity had assumed a different shape. It is
true that I cared no longer for the reputation women can bestow; but I
was eager for the applause of men, and I did not like the long labour
necessary to attain it. I wished to make a short road to my object, and
I eagerly followed every turn but the right one, in the hopes of its
leading me sooner to my goal.

The great characteristic of a vain man in contradistinction to an
ambitious man, his eternal obstacle to a high and honourable fame, is
this: he requires for any expenditure of trouble too speedy a reward;
he cannot wait for years, and climb, step by step, to a lofty object;
whatever he attempts, he must seize at a single grasp. Added to this, he
is incapable of an exclusive attention to one end; the universality of
his cravings is not contented, unless it devours all; and thus he is
perpetually doomed to fritter away his energies by grasping at the
trifling baubles within his reach, and in gathering the worthless fruit
which a single sun can mature.

This, then, was my fault, and the cause of my failure. I could not give
myself up to finance, nor puzzle through the intricacies of commerce:
even the common parliamentary drudgeries of constant attendance and
late hours were insupportable to me; and so after two or three "splendid
orations," as my friends termed them, I was satisfied with the puffs of
the pamphleteers and closed my political career. I was now, then, the
wit and the conversationalist. With my fluency of speech and variety
of information, these were easy distinctions; and the popularity of a
dinner-table or the approbation of a literary coterie consoled me for
the more public and more durable applause I had resigned.

But even this gratification did not last long. I fell ill; and the
friends who gathered round the wit fled from the valetudinarian. This
disgusted me, and when I was sufficiently recovered I again returned to
the Continent. But I had a fit of misanthropy and solitude upon me, and
so it was not to courts and cities, the scen