Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I had no choice but to rush from the lonely room, haunted by tempting phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober down the fever of the heart by some violent bodily fatigue. The ardour which belongs to early youth, and which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely to shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I laboured, it was with that full sense of labour which (as I found at a much later period of life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning—that marble image—warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the worship of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless stone.
At my uncle's, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance. At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due importance. Politics ran high; and I had not been three days at Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had their charms for me. Trevanion's prophecy about himself seemed about to be fulfilled. There were rumours of changes in the cabinet. Trevanion's name was bandied to and fro, struck from praise to blame, high and low, as a shuttlecock. Still the changes were not made, and the cabinet held firm. Not a word in the Morning Post, under the head of fashionable intelligence, as to rumours that would have agitated me more than the rise and fall of governments—no hint of "the speedy nuptials of the daughter and sole heiress of a distinguished and wealthy commoner:" only now and then, in enumerating the circle of brilliant guests at the house of some party chief, I gulped back the heart that rushed to my lips, when I saw the names of Lady Ellinor and Miss Trevanion.
But amongst all that prolific progeny of the periodical press—remote offspring of my great namesake and ancestor, (for I hold the faith of my father,)—where was the Literary Times?—what had so long retarded its promised blossoms? Not a leaf in the shape of advertisements had yet emerged from its mother earth. I hoped from my heart that the whole thing was abandoned, and would not mention it in my letters home, lest I should revive the mere idea of it. But, in default of the Literary Times, there did appear a new journal, a daily journal too; a tall, slender, and meagre stripling, with a vast head, by way of prospectus, which protruded itself for three weeks successively at the top of the leading article;—with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs;—and the smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper ever stood upon! And yet this attenuated journal had a plump and plethoric title, a title that smacked of turtle and venison; an aldermanic, portly, grandiose, Falstaffian title—it was called The Capitalist. And all those fine subtle paragraphs were larded out with receipts how to make money. There was an El Dorado in every sentence. To believe that paper, you would think no man had ever yet found a proper return for his pounds, shillings, and pence. You would have turned up your nose at twenty per cent. There was a great deal about Ireland—not her wrongs, thank Heaven! but her fisheries: a long inquiry what had become of the pearls for which Britain was once so famous: a learned disquisition upon certain lost gold mines now happily rediscovered: a very ingenious proposition to turn London smoke into manure, by a new chemical process: recommendations to the poor to hatch chickens in ovens like the ancient Egyptians: agricultural schemes for sowing the waste lands in England with onions, upon the system adopted near Bedford, net produce one hundred pounds an acre. In short, according to that paper, every rood of ground might well maintain its man, and every shilling be like Hobson's money-bag, "the fruitful parent of a hundred more." For three days, at the newspaper room of the Union Club, men talked of this journal: some pished, some sneered, some wondered; till an ill-natured mathematician, who had just taken his degree, and had spare time on his hands, sent a long letter to the Morning Chronicle, showing up more blunders, in some article to which the editor of The Capitalist had specially invited attention, (unlucky dog!) than would have paved the whole island of Laputa. After that time, not a soul read The Capitalist. How long it dragged on its existence I know not; but it certainly did not die of a maladie de langueur.
Little thought I, when I joined in the laugh against The Capitalist, that I ought rather to have followed it to its grave, in black crape and weepers,—unfeeling wretch that I was! But, like a poet, O Capitalist! thou wert not discovered, and appreciated, and prized, and mourned, till thou wert dead and buried, and the bill came in for thy monument!
The first term of my college life was just expiring, when I received a letter from my mother, so agitated, so alarming, at first reading so unintelligible, that I could only see that some great misfortune had befallen us; and I stopped short and dropped on my knees, to pray for the life and health of those whom that misfortune more specially seemed to menace; and then—and then, towards the end of the last blurred sentence—read twice, thrice, over—I could cry, "Thank Heaven, thank Heaven! it is only, then, money after all!"
STATISTICAL ACCOUNTS OF SCOTLAND.
It is a term of very wide application, this of statistics—extending to everything in the state of a country subject to variation either from the energies and fancies of men, or from the operations of nature, in so far as these, or the knowledge of them, has any tendency to occasion change in the condition of the country. Its elements must be either changeable in themselves, or the cause of change; because the use of the whole matter is to direct men what to do for their advantage, moral or physical—by legislation, when the case is of sufficient magnitude—or otherwise by the wisdom and enterprise of individuals.
Governments, it is plain, must have the greatest interest in possessing knowledge of this sort; but they have not been the first to engage very earnestly in obtaining it. It would seem that, in all countries, the first very noticeable efforts in this way have been made by individuals.
In this country we have now from government more and better statistics than from any other source; for besides the decennial census, there is the yearly produce in this way of Crown Commissions and of Parliamentary Committees; and, moreover, there is the late institution of a statistical department in connexion with the Board of Trade, for arranging, digesting, and rendering more accessible all matter of this kind collected, from time to time, by the different branches of the administration. But before statistical knowledge became the object of much care to the government of this country, it had been well cultivated by individuals. So in Germany statistics first took a scientific form in the works of an individual about the middle of the last century: and in France, the unfinished Mémoires des Intendants, prepared on the order of the king, were scarcely an exception, since meant for the private instruction of the young prince. But without attaching undue importance to the fact of mere precedence, it may be said that, considering the chief uses of this kind of knowledge, it has received more contributions from individuals than could have been expected.