CHAPTER VII
I now make a long stride in my narrative. I am domesticated with the Trevanions. A very short conversation with the statesman sufficed to decide my father; and the pith of it lay in this single sentence uttered by Trevanion: "I promise you one thing,—he shall never be idle!"
Looking back, I am convinced that my father was right, and that he understood my character, and the temptations to which I was most prone, when he consented to let me resign college and enter thus prematurely on the world of men. I was naturally so joyous that I should have made college life a holiday, and then, in repentance, worked myself into a phthisis.
And my father, too, was right that though I could study, I was not meant for a student.
After all, the thing was an experiment. I had time to spare; if the experiment failed, a year's delay would not necessarily be a year's loss.
I am ensconced, then, at Mr. Trevanion's; I have been there some months.
It is late in the winter; Parliament and the season have commenced. I
work hard,—Heaven knows, harder than I should have worked at college.
Take a day for sample.
Trevanion gets up at eight o'clock, and in all—weathers rides an hour before breakfast; at nine he takes that meal in his wife's dressing- room; at half-past nine he comes into his study. By that time he expects to find done by his secretary the work I am about to describe.
On coming home,—or rather before going to bed, which is usually after three o'clock,—it is Mr. Trevanion's habit to leave on the table of the said study a list of directions for the secretary. The following, which I take at random from many I have preserved, may show their multifarious nature:—
1. Look out in the Reports (Committee, House of Lords) for the last seven years all that is said about the growth of flax; mark the passages for me.
2. Do, do. "Irish Emigration."
3. Hunt out second volume of Kames's "History of Man," passage containing Reid's Logic,—don't know where the book is!
4. How does the line beginning Lumina conjurent, inter something, end? Is it in Grey? See.
5. Fracastorius writes: Quantum hoe infecit vitium, quot adiverit urbes. Query, ought it not, in strict grammar, to be injecerit, instead of infecit? If you don't know, write to father.
6. Write the four letters in full from the notes I leave; i. e., about the Ecclesiastical Courts.
7. Look out Population Returns: strike average of last five years (between mortality and births) in Devonshire and Lancashire.
8. Answer these six begging letters "No,"—civilly.
9. The other six, to constituents, "that I have no interest with Government."
10. See, if you have time, whether any of the new books on the round table are not trash.
11. I want to know All about Indian corn.
12. Longinus says something, somewhere, in regret for uncongenial pursuits (public life, I suppose): what is it? N. B. Longinus is not in my London catalogue, but is here, I know,—I think in a box in the lumber-room.
13. Set right the calculation I leave