"To die beneath the hoofs of trampling steeds,
That is the lot of heroes upon earth!"
[CONCLUSION.]
He that commends me to mine own content,
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop;
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself.
Comedy of Errors.
Three eventful years have passed, and a general peace is giving rest to exhausted Europe. The war has cut off many a brave man; but it remained for peace to terminate the military career of a rising soldier in L'Isle's person; and sad to say, before he was either Major general or knight of the Bath; though sought in many a dangerous path, he had not found his golden spurs.
Regiments have been disbanded, his comrades are scattered, and he himself has nothing to do, not even the poor resource of having to study economy on half-pay, or of looking for more additional means to eke out a living.
It is the curse of those entirely engrossing pursuits, which excite all our enthusiasm, and task every energy, and of which the statesman's and the soldier's callings are the best examples, that, when they fail us, we can find no substitute. All things else are, by comparison, stale, flat, and unprofitable. Can the brandy drinker cheer himself with draughts of small beer? Screw up his nervous energies to their accustomed tone with slops?
Tired to death of fox-hunting, pleasant shooting, and country neighbors; all the means of excitement around him exhausted, L'Isle lounged in the library at C——d Hall, with half a dozen open but discarded volumes before him, revolving in his mind all possible means of occupation. At one time he would resolve to travel the world over, and get up a personal narrative, attractive as that of Humboldt, and views of nature, that should look through nature's surface to the recognition of Nature's God, whom the philosopher seems never to have found in all his works. At another time, in order more effectively to counteract the ill effects, on mind and habits, of the soldier's exciting and unsettled life, he resolves to subject himself to still severer regimen: not to go rambling about the world, an idling philosopher, but to tie himself down to one spot, and take violently to a course of high farming; grow the largest turnips, breed the fattest South-downs, and the heaviest Devonshires, and carry off agricultural prizes as substitutes for additional Waterloo medals.
But this was too severe a contrast to his late mode of life, and the prospect soon disgusted him utterly. Having strong influence to back him, he now thought of getting a seat in Parliament, and for a moment the prophetic cries of 'Hear! hear!' arose from both sides of a full House of Commons. But he knew that the occasion, even more than the man, makes the orator; and in 'this weak piping time of peace,' these cost-counting, debt-paying days, he foresaw no occasion that could call forth the thunders of Demosthenes or Burke.—But although a new light shines in upon him, and he suddenly makes up his mind that, since he can no longer take the field, because all the world is tired of fighting, and yet more of paying the bills run up in that expensive diversion, he will write the narrative of the campaigns in which he had taken part, without letting the 'quorum pars magna fui' fill too large a place in the picture.—Where can he find so much of the materials needed in the construction of his work as in London? So to London he went.
The season was at its height, and the town was full. L'Isle's object required that he should not only examine many musty papers, but see many persons; as some of his gayer friends soon found him out, and induced him to look in upon the inner circles of London fashionable life, to which his early and long absence from England had kept him a stranger.