My Dear Mr. Trevanion,—I thank you cordially, and so we do all,
for your reply to my letter informing you of the villanous traps
through which we have passed,—not indeed with whole skins, but
still whole in life and limb,—which, considering that the traps
were three, and the teeth sharp, was more than we could reasonably
expect. We have taken to the wastes, like wise foxes as we are,
and I do not think a bait can be found that will again snare the
fox paternal. As for the fox filial it is different, and I am
about to prove to you that he is burning to redeem the family
disgrace. Ah! my dear Mr. Trevanion, if you are busy with “blue-
books” when this letter reaches you, stop here, and put it aside
for some rare moment of leisure. I am about to open my heart to
you, and ask you, who know the world so well, to aid me in an
escape from those flammantia maenia wherewith I find that world
begirt and enclosed. For look you, sir, you and my father were
right when you both agreed that the mere book-life was not meant
for me. And yet what is not book-life, to a young man who would
make his way through the ordinary and conventional paths to
fortune? All the professions are so book-lined, book-hemmed, book-
choked, that wherever these strong hands of mine stretch towards
action, they find themselves met by octavo ramparts, flanked with
quarto crenellations. For first, this college life, opening to
scholarships, and ending, perchance, as you political economists
would desire, in Malthusian fellowships,—premiums for celibacy,—
consider what manner of thing it is!

Three years, book upon book,—a great Dead Sea before one; three
years long, and all the apples that grow on the shore full of the
ashes of pica and primer! Those three years ended, the fellowship,
it may be, won,—still books, books, if the whole world does not
close at the college gates. Do I, from scholar, effloresce into
literary man, author by profession? Books, books! Do I go into
the law? Books, books! Ars longa, vita brevis, which,
paraphrased, means that it is slow work before one fags one’s way
to a brief! Do I turn doctor? Why, what but books can kill time
until, at the age of forty, a lucky chance may permit me to kill
something else? The Church (for which, indeed, I don’t profess to
be good enough),—that is book-life par excellence, whether,
inglorious and poor, I wander through long lines of divines and
Fathers; or, ambitious of bishoprics, I amend the corruptions, not
of the human heart, but of a Greek text, and through defiles of
scholiasts and commentators win my way to the See. In short,
barring the noble profession of arms,—which you know, after all,
is not precisely the road to fortune,—can you tell me any means by
which one may escape these eternal books, this mental clockwork and
corporeal lethargy? Where can this passion for life that runs riot
through my veins find its vent? Where can these stalwart limbs and
this broad chest grow of value and worth in this hot-bed of
cerebral inflammation and dyspeptic intellect? I know what is in
me; I know I have the qualities that should go with stalwart limbs
and broad chest. I have some plain common-sense, some promptitude
and keenness, some pleasure in hardy danger, some fortitude in
bearing pain,—qualities for which I bless Heaven, for they are
qualities good and useful in private life. But in the forum of
men, in the market of fortune, are they not flocci, nauci, nihili?

In a word, dear sir and friend, in this crowded Old World there is
not the same room that our bold forefathers found for men to walk
about and jostle their neighbors. No; they must sit down like boys
at the form, and work out their tasks, with rounded shoulders and
aching fingers. There has been a pastoral age, and a hunting age,
and a fighting age; now we have arrived at the age sedentary. Men
who sit longest carry all before them,—puny, delicate fellows,
with hands just strong enough to wield a pen, eyes so bleared by
the midnight lamp that they see no joy in that buxom sun (which
draws me forth into the fields, as life draws the living), and
digestive organs worn and macerated by the relentless flagellation
of the brain. Certainly, if this is to be the Reign of Mind, it is
idle to repine, and kick against the pricks; but is it true that
all these qualities of action that are within me are to go for
nothing? If I were rich and happy in mind and circumstance, well
and good; I should shoot, hunt, farm, travel, enjoy life, and snap
my fingers at ambition. If I were so poor and so humbly bred that
I could turn gamekeeper or whipper in, as pauper gentlemen
virtually did of old, well and good too; I should exhaust this
troublesome vitality of mine by nightly battles with poachers, and
leaps over double dikes and stone walls. If I were so depressed of
spirit that I could live without remorse on my father’s small
means, and exclaim, with Claudian, “The earth gives me feasts that
cost nothing,” well and good too; it were a life to suit a
vegetable, or a very minor poet. But as it is,—here I open
another leaf of my heart to you! To say that, being poor, I want
to make a fortune, is to say that I am an Englishman. To attach
ourselves to a thing positive, belongs to our practical race. Even
in our dreams, if we build castles in the air, they are not Castles
of Indolence,—indeed they have very little of the castle about
them, and look much more like Hoare’s Bank, on the east side of
Temple Bar! I desire, then, to make a fortune. But I differ from
my countrymen, first, by desiring only what you rich men would call
but a small fortune; secondly, in wishing that I may not spend my
whole life in that fortune-making. Just see, now, how I am placed.

Under ordinary circumstances, I must begin by taking from my father
a large slice of an income that will ill spare paring. According
to my calculation, my parents and my uncle want all they have got,
and the subtraction of the yearly sum on which Pisistratus is to
live till he can live by his own labors, would be so much taken
from the decent comforts of his kindred. If I return to Cambridge,
with all economy, I must thus narrow still more the res angusta
domi; and when Cambridge is over, and I am turned loose upon the
world,—failing, as is likely enough, of the support of a
fellowship,—how many years must I work, or rather, alas! not work,
at the Bar (which, after all, seems my best calling) before I can
in my turn provide for those who, till then, rob themselves for me;
till I have arrived at middle life, and they are old and worn out;
till the chink of the golden bowl sounds but hollow at the ebbing
well? I would wish that, if I can make money, those I love best
may enjoy it while enjoyment is yet left to them; that my father
shall see “The History of Human Error” complete, bound in russia on
his shelves; that my mother shall have the innocent pleasures that
content her, before age steals the light from her happy smile; that
before Roland’s hair is snow-white (alas! the snows there thicken
fast), he shall lean on my arm while we settle together where the
ruin shall be repaired or where left to the owls, and where the
dreary bleak waste around shall laugh with the gleam of corn. For
you know the nature of this Cumberland soil,—you, who possess much
of it, and have won so many fair acres from the wild; you know that
my uncle’s land, now (save a single farm) scarce worth a shilling
an acre, needs but capital to become an estate more lucrative than
ever his ancestors owned. You know that, for you have applied your
capital to the same kind of land, and in doing so, what blessings—
which you scarcely think of in your London library—you have
effected, what mouths you feed, what hands you employ! I have
calculated that my uncle’s moors, which now scarce maintain two or
three shepherds, could, manured by money, maintain two hundred
families by their labor. All this is worth trying for; therefore
Pisistratus wants to make money. Not so much,—he does not require
millions; a few spare thousand pounds would go a long way, and with
a modest capital to begin with, Roland should become a true
squire,—a real landowner, not the mere lord of a desert. Now
then, dear sir, advise me how I may, with such qualities as I
possess, arrive at that capital—ay, and before it is too late—so
that money-making may not last till my grave.

Turning in despair from this civilized world of ours, I have cast
my eyes to a world far older,—and yet more to a world in its giant
childhood. India here, Australia there,—what say you, sir, you
who will see dispassionately those things that float before my eyes
through a golden haze, looming large in the distance? Such is my
confidence in your judgment that you have but to say, “Fool, give
up thine El Dorados and stay at home; stick to the books and the
desk; annihilate that redundance of animal life that is in thee;
grow a mental machine: thy physical gifts are of no avail to thee;
take thy place among the slaves of the Lamp,”—and I will obey
without a murmur. But if I am right; if I have in me attributes
that here find no market; if my repinings are but the instincts of
nature that, out of this decrepit civilization, desire vent for
growth in the young stir of some more rude and vigorous social
system,—then give me, I pray, that advice which may clothe my idea
in some practical and tangible embodiments. Have I made myself
understood?

We take no newspaper here, but occasionally one finds its way from
the parsonage; and I have lately rejoiced at a paragraph that spoke
of your speedy entrance into the Administration as a thing certain.
I write to you before you are a minister, and you see what I seek
is not in the way of official patronage. A niche in an office,—
oh, to me that were worse than all! Yet I did labor hard with you,
but,—that was different. I write to you thus frankly, knowing
your warm, noble heart, and as if you were my father. Allow me to
add my humble but earnest congratulations on Miss Trevanion’s
approaching marriage with one worthy, if not of her, at least of
her station. I do so as becomes one whom you have allowed to
retain the right to pray for the happiness of you and yours. My
dear Mr. Trevanion, this is a long letter, and I dare not even read
it over, lest, if I do, I should not send it. Take it with all its
faults, and judge of it with that kindness with which you have
judged ever,

Your grateful and devoted servant,

Pisistratus Caxton.