and abler architects had
   already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice
   was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only
   delving amidst rubbish.

   "This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.
   The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise
   of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved
   by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,
   instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.
   Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want
   of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education
   were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only
   dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course
   of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were
   vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and
   even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but
   I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

   "I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor
   be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual
   must perform his portion of work:—happy enough if he can choose it
   according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of
   observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .

   "From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own
   eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern
   writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I
   came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as
   I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .

   "It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts
   and various failures. I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I
   was in time wise enough to retrieve. Pushing out as I did, without
   compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning,
   what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

   "Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant,
   more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day
   to day. I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed
   upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation. I breakfasted
   with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger
   than the table. I became solitary and morose, the necessary
   consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my
   time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the
   learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out
   mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.

   "In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the
   perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their
   effect. Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed
   some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and
   marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting
   sin. I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never
   read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one
   upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.
   It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic
   mania. I took the infection at the usual time, went through its
   various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected. I
   discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is
   fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his
   ambition and his powers.

   "My ambition was boundless; my dreams of glory were not confined to
   authorship and literature alone; but every sphere in which the
   intellect of man exerts itself revolved in a blaze of light before
   me. And there I sat in my solitude and dreamed such wondrous
   dreams! Events were thickening around me which were soon to change
   the world, but they were unmarked by me. The country was changing
   to a mighty theatre, on whose stage those who were as great as I
   fancied myself to be were to enact a stupendous drama in which I had
   no part. I saw it not; I knew it not; and yet how infinitely
   beautiful were the imaginations of my solitude! Fancy shook her
   kaleidoscope each moment as chance directed, and lo! what new,
   fantastic, brilliant, but what unmeaning visions. My ambitious
   anticipations were as boundless as they were various and
   conflicting. There was not a path which leads to glory in which I
   was not destined to gather laurels. As a warrior I would conquer
   and overrun the world. As a statesman I would reorganize and govern
   it. As a historian I would consign it all to immortality; and in my
   leisure moments I would be a great poet and a man of the world.

   "In short, I was already enrolled in that large category of what are
   called young men of genius,—men who are the pride of their sisters
   and the glory of their grandmothers,—men of whom unheard-of things
   are expected, till after long preparation comes a portentous
   failure, and then they are forgotten; subsiding into indifferent
   apprentices and attorneys' clerks.

   "Alas for the golden imaginations of our youth! They are bright and
   beautiful, but they fade. They glitter brightly enough to deceive
   the wisest and most cautious, and we garner them up in the most
   secret caskets of our hearts; but are they not like the coins which
   the Dervise gave the merchant in the story? When we look for them
   the next morning, do we not find them withered leaves?"

The ideal picture just drawn is only a fuller portraiture of the youth whose outlines have been already sketched by the companions of his earlier years. If his hero says, "I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table," one of his family says of the boy Motley that "if there were five minutes before dinner, when he came into the parlor he always took up some book near at hand and began to read until dinner was announced." The same unbounded thirst for knowledge, the same history of various attempts and various failures, the same ambition, not yet fixed in its aim, but showing itself in restless effort, belong to the hero of the story and its narrator.

Let no man despise the first efforts of immature genius. Nothing can be more crude as a novel, nothing more disappointing, than "Morton's Hope." But in no other of Motley's writings do we get such an inside view of his character with its varied impulses, its capricious appetites, its unregulated forces, its impatient grasp for all kinds of knowledge. With all his university experiences at home and abroad, it might be said with a large measure of truth that he was a self-educated man, as he had been a self-taught boy. His instincts were too powerful to let him work quietly in the common round of school and college training. Looking at him as his companions describe him, as he delineates himself 'mutato nomine,' the chances of success would have seemed to all but truly prophetic eyes very doubtful, if not decidedly against him. Too many brilliant young novel-readers and lovers of poetry, excused by their admirers for their shortcomings on the strength of their supposed birthright of "genius," have ended where they began; flattered into the vain belief that they were men at eighteen or twenty, and finding out at fifty that they were and always had been nothing more than boys.