boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only dreams.  There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course of life.  I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were vague and shapeless.  I had crowded together the most gorgeous and even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

“I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual must perform his portion of work:—­happy enough if he can choose it according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of observing or superintending the whole operation. . . .

“From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. . . .

“It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon my various attempts and various failures.  I forbear to comment upon mistakes which I was in time wise enough to retrieve.  Pushing out as I did, without compass and without experience, on the boundless ocean of learning, what could I expect but an utter and a hopeless shipwreck?

“Thus I went on, becoming more learned, and therefore more ignorant, more confused in my brain, and more awkward in my habits, from day to day.  I was ever at my studies, and could hardly be prevailed upon to allot a moment to exercise or recreation.  I breakfasted with a pen behind my ear, and dined in company with a folio bigger than the table.  I became solitary and morose, the necessary consequence of reckless study; talked impatiently of the value of my time, and the immensity of my labors; spoke contemptuously of the learning and acquirements of the whole world, and threw out mysterious hints of the magnitude and importance of my own project.

“In the midst of all this study and this infant authorship the perusal of such masses of poetry could not fail to produce their effect.  Of a youth whose mind, like mine at that period, possessed some general capability, without perhaps a single prominent and marked talent, a proneness to imitation is sure to be the besetting sin.  I consequently, for a large portion of my earlier life, never read a work which struck my fancy, without planning a better one upon its model; for my ambition, like my vanity, knew no bounds.  It was a matter of course that I should be attacked by the poetic mania.  I took the infection at the usual time, went through its various stages, and recovered as soon as could be expected.  I discovered soon enough that emulation is not capability, and he is fortunate to whom is soonest revealed the relative extent of his ambition and his powers.