No profession could, in any case, have well gained the early love of Sterling.

And perhaps withal the most tragic element of his life is even this, That there now was none to which he could fitly, by those wiser than himself, have been bound and constrained, that he might learn to love it.

So swift, light-limbed and fiery an Arab courser ought, for all manner of reasons, to have been trained to saddle and harness.

Roaming at full gallop over the heaths,--especially when your heath was London, and English and European life, in the nineteenth century,--he suffered much, and did comparatively little.

I have known few creatures whom it was more wasteful to send forth with the bridle thrown up, and to set to steeple-hunting instead of running on highways! But it is the lot of many such, in this dislocated time,--Heaven mend it! In a better time there will be other "professions" than those three extremely cramp, confused and indeed almost obsolete ones: professions, if possible, that are true, and do _not_ require you at the threshold to constitute yourself an impostor.