Now, it can scarcely be denied, that the good Doctor was guilty of a certain amount of weakness in listening patiently to all this rant.  Not that the rant was very blamable in a lad of eighteen; for have we not all, while we are going through our course of Shelley, talked very much the same abominable stuff, and thought ourselves the grandest fellows upon earth on account of that very length of ear which was patent to all the world save our precious selves; blinded by our self-conceit, and wondering in wrath why everybody was laughing at us?  But the truth is, the Doctor was easy and indulgent to a fault, and dreaded nothing so much, save telling a lie, as hurting people’s feelings; besides, as the acknowledged wise man of Whitbury, he was a little proud of playing the Maecenas; and he had, and not unjustly, a high, opinion of John Briggs’s powers.  So he had lent him books, corrected his taste in many matters, and, by dint of petting and humouring, had kept the wayward youth half-a-dozen times from running away from his father, who was an apothecary in the town, and from the general practitioner, Mr. Bolus, under whom John Briggs fulfilled the office of co-assistant with Tom Thurnall.  Plenty of trouble had both the lads given the Doctor in the last five years, but of very different kinds, Tom, though he was in everlasting hot water, as the most incorrigible scapegrace for ten miles round, contrived to confine his naughtiness strictly to play-hours, while he learnt everything which was to be learnt with marvellous quickness, and so utterly fulfilled the ideal of a bottle-boy (for of him, too, as of all things, I presume, an ideal exists eternally in the supra-sensual Platonic universe), that Bolus told his father,—­“In hours, sir, he takes care of my business as well as I could myself; but out of hours, sir, I believe he is possessed by seven devils.”

John Briggs, on the other hand, sinned in the very opposite direction.  Too proud to learn his business, and too proud also to play the scapegrace as Tom did, he neglected alike work and amusement, for lazy mooning over books, and the dreams which books called up.  He made perpetual mistakes in the shop; and then considered himself insulted by an “inferior spirit,” if poor Bolus called him to account for it.  Indeed, had it not been for many applications of that “precious oil of unity,” with which the good Doctor daily anointed the creaking wheels of Whitbury society, John Briggs and his master would have long ago “broken out of gear,” and parted company in mutual wrath and fury.  And now, indeed, the critical moment seemed come at last; for the lad began afresh to declare his deliberate intention of going to London to seek his fortune, in spite of parents and all the world.

“To live on here, and never to rise, perhaps, above the post of correspondent to a country newspaper!—­To publish a volume of poems by subscription and have to go round, hat in hand, begging five shillings’ worth of patronage from every stupid country squire—­intolerable!  I must go!  Shakespeare was never Shakespeare till he fled from miserable Stratford, to become at once the friend of Sidney and Southampton.”