' No one
had met Archie, a malady most incident to only sons. He flew
his private signal, and none heeded it; It seemed he was abroad
in a world from which the very hope of intimacy was banished;
and he looked round about him on the concourse of his
fellow-students, and forward to the trivial days and acquaintances
that were to come, without hope or interest.
*
'My poor, dear boy!' observed Glenalmond. 'My poor, dear
and, if you will allow me to say so, very foolish boy! You
are only discovering where you are; to one of your
temperament, or of mine, a painful discovery. The world
was not made for us; it was made for ten hundred millions
of me, all different from each other and from us; there's
no royal road, we just have to sclamber and tumble.'
*
Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas
was just a gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet
you see merchants who go and labour themselves into a great
fortune and thence into the bankruptcy court; scribblers
who keep scribbling at little articles until their temper
is a cross to all who come about them, as though Pharaoh
should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a
pyramid; and fine young men who work themselves into a
decline, and are driven off in a hearse with white plumes
upon it. Would you not suppose these persons had been
whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies the promise of
some momentous destiny? and that this Lukewarm bullet on
which they play their farces was the bull's-eye and
centrepoint of all the universe? And yet it is not so.
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