I went to the University with a great fund of general reading, and habits
of constant application. My uncle, who, having no children of his own,
began to be ambitious for me, formed great expectations of my career at
Oxford. I staid there three years, and did nothing! I did not gain a
single prize, nor did I attempt anything above the ordinary degree. The
fact is, that nothing seemed to me worth the labour of success. I
conversed with those who had obtained the highest academical reputation,
and I smiled with a consciousness of superiority at the boundlessness of
their vanity, and the narrowness of their views. The limits of the
distinction they had gained seemed to them as wide as the most extended
renown; and the little knowledge their youth had acquired only appeared
to them an excuse for the ignorance and the indolence of maturer years.
Was it to equal these that I was to labour? I felt that I already
surpassed them! Was it to gain their good opinion, or, still worse, that
of their admirers? Alas! I had too long learned to live for myself to
find any happiness in the respect of the idlers I despised.
I left Oxford at the age of twenty-one. I succeeded to the large estates
of my inheritance, and for the first time I felt the vanity so natural to
youth when I went up to London to enjoy the resources of the Capital, and
to display the powers I possessed to revel in whatever those resources
could yield. I found society like the Jewish temple: any one is admitted
into its threshold; none but the chiefs of the institution into its
recesses.
Young, rich, of an ancient and honourable name, pursuing pleasure rather
as a necessary excitement than an occasional occupation, and agreeable to
the associates I drew around me because my profusion contributed to their
enjoyment, and my temper to their amusement--I found myself courted by
many, and avoided by none. I soon discovered that all civility is but
the mask of design. I smiled at the kindness of the fathers who, hearing
that I was talented, and knowing that I was rich, looked to my support in
whatever political side they had espoused. I saw in the notes of the
mothers their anxiety for the establishment of their daughters, and their
respect for my acres; and in the cordiality of the sons who had horses to
sell and rouge-et-noir debts to pay, I detected all that veneration for
my money which implied such contempt for its possessor. By nature
observant, and by misfortune sarcastic, I looked upon the various
colourings of society with a searching and philosophic eye: I unravelled
the intricacies which knit servility with arrogance and meanness with
ostentation; and I traced to its sources that universal vulgarity of
inward sentiment and external manner, which, in all classes, appears to
me to constitute the only unvarying characteristic of our countrymen. In
proportion as I increased my knowledge of others, I shrunk with a deeper
disappointment and dejection into my own resources. The first moment of
real happiness which I experienced for a whole year was when I found
myself about to seek, beneath the influence of other skies, that more
extended acquaintance with my species which might either draw me to them
with a closer connection, or at last reconcile me to the ties which
already existed.
I will not dwell upon my adventures abroad: there is little to interest
others in a recital which awakens no interest in one's self. I sought
for wisdom, and I acquired but knowledge. I thirsted for the truth, the
tenderness of love, and I found but its fever and its falsehood. Like
the two Florimels of Spenser, I mistook, in my delirium, the delusive
fabrication of the senses for the divine reality of the heart; and I only
awoke from my deceit when the phantom I had worshipped melted into snow.
Whatever I pursued partook of the energy, yet fitfulness of my nature;
mingling to-day in the tumults of the city, and to-morrow alone with my
own heart in the solitude of unpeopled nature; now revelling in the
wildest excesses, and now tracing, with a painful and unwearied search,
the intricacies of science; alternately governing others, and subdued by
the tyranny which my own passions imposed--I passed through the ordeal
unshrinking yet unscathed. "The education of life," says De Stael,
"perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous." I do not
inquire, Monkton, to which of these classes I belong; but I feel too
well, that though my mind has not been depraved, it has found no
perfection but in misfortune; and that whatever be the acquirements of
later years, they have nothing which can compensate for the losses of our
youth.