For the Queen

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1913 Excerpt: ...been educated for the bar, and had come into the title and estates quite unexpectedly when he was twenty-six years old. He was an orphan, and lived much alone, was of studious tastes and quiet habits, and he heard of his good fortune with something akin to indifference. His principal satisfaction was that now he could relinquish his profession, of which he had never been particularly fond, and devote his whole attention to branches of study which were more congenial to him. He began to read deeply, and if only he had commenced his career as a student under a suitable mentor the energy and intellect which he readily commanded would have carried him forward without doubt into the foremost ranks of the thinkers of the day. But he was versatile in his tastes, impressionable by nature, and a trifle morbid and pessimistic in his ideas of his fellows, which begat in him a slight censoriousness. His appetite for study was insatiable, but not altogether healthy. He had flitted from school to school of ancient and latter-day philosophy, reckoning himself at various times amongst the disciples of the most untenable, until he suddenly discovered the flaw in their doctrine and abruptly shifted his quarters. He read everything that came near him, reading, therefore, a little that was wholesome and a good deal that was not, until at thirty-five years of age it had commenced to dawn upon him that he had wasted some of the best years of his life in mastering doctrines and tenets which he had afterwards as religiously overthrown in grappling with monsters of his own rearing; and, in short, that his multifarious stock of learning had won him nothing but the reputation of a pedant, and the most decided consciousness that he was still an extremely ignorant and unsatisfied man. ...