had no notion, however, of the preliminary stages; the high stool in the close street; luncheon at a counter, standing (I liked to have my meals good, plentiful, often, and in comfort, even then); and imprisonment at the office on the eves of mail nights till the large hours p.m.  Even the full fruition of such aspirations—­the large waistcoat beginning to ‘point,’ (as it soon does in merchants), heavy watchchain, and cheerful conviction of the coming scarcity of necessaries for everybody else, would have failed to please.  The sort of merchant I wanted to be was never found in ‘Post Office Directory,’ but in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ trading to Bussorah, chiefly in pearls and diamonds.  When the Paterfamiliases of my acquaintance instance certain stenches and messes which their Toms and Harrys make with chemicals all over their house, as a proof of ‘their natural turn for engineering,’ I say, ‘Very likely,’ or ‘A capital thing,’ but I think of that early attraction of my own towards Bussorah.  The young gentlemen never dream of what I once heard described, in brief, as the real business life of a scientific apprentice:  ’To lie on your back with a candle in your hand, while another fellow knocks nails into a boiler.’

Boys have rarely any special aptitude for anything practical beyond punching each others’ heads, or (and these are the clever ones) for keeping their own heads unpunched.  As a rule, in short, Nature is not demonstrative as respects our professional future.

It must nevertheless be conceded that if the boy is ever father to the man in this respect, it is in connection with literature.  Also, however prosaic their works are fated to be, it is curious that the aspirants for the profession below Burgesses always begin with Poetry.  Even Harriet Martineau wrote verses in early life bad enough to comfort the soul of any respectable parent.  The approach to the Temple of Literary Fame is almost always through double gates—­couplets.  And yet I have known youthful poets, apparently bound for Paternoster Row, bolt off the course in a year or two, to the delight of their friends, and become, of their own free will, drysalters.

There is so much talk about the ’indications of immortality in early childhood’ (of a very different kind from those referred to by Wordsworth), and it is so much the habit of biographers to use magnifiers when their subject is small, that it needs some courage to avow my belief that the tastes of boys have very little significance.  A clever boy can be trained to almost anything, and an ordinary boy will not do one thing much better than another.  With the Geniuses I will allow (for the sake of peace and quietness) that Nature is all-powerful, but with nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand of us, Second Nature, Use, is the true mistress; and what will doubtless strike some people as almost paradoxical, but is nevertheless a fact, Literature is the calling in which she has the greatest sway.