( 51G ) 



AN EPOCH IN THE LIFE OF MULCIBER SMITH. 



MULCIBER T. B. Smith was a philosopher, and something of a fatalist. 

 His philosophy had made him a cynic ; his fatalism, an idler. Under 

 their influence in combination, his prospects in life had become any- 

 thing but cheering. No man ever more bitterly inveighed against for- 

 tune, for no man, he thought, had ever been more scurvily treated by 

 the goddess. The fact is, however, that Mulciber was more prone to 

 habits of profitless cogitation than to habits of industry ; and as moral 

 do not always turn out quite so successfully as mercantile speculations, 

 he was richer in ideas than in gold, so that fortune was not so much to 

 be reproached, after all. 



At the age of twenty-seven he had already tried several schemes, and 

 devised many more, whereby to gain for himself a gentlemanly subsist- 

 ence ; for it so happened, most unluckily, that he was not born to a 

 ready-fabricated competency, albeit no one was better qualified to fulfil 

 the office of a patrician in one of its chiefest attributes, namely, a most 

 contemptuous antipathy to business. Bred to the law, he had become 

 early disgusted with the drudgery of that sordid profession so he deemed 

 it and, trusting to the general excellence of his parts, he had resolved 

 to abandon forensic eminence, and to live by the exertion of his versatile 

 talents. But what Mulciber called exertion was, he at length found, 

 insufficient to secure those pecuniary supplies without which the most 

 gentlemanly disposed and highly gifted people are apt to become out 

 at elbows. 



Mulciber was a "genius;" his friends told him so, and he had too 

 high a sense of their discernment to doubt the truth or the soundness of 

 their opinion in this respect : besides, his own judgment, modestly 

 avowed, inclined to the same conviction. Nothing is more dangerous 

 to the worldly prosperity of a youth than the consciousness of genius 

 really or imaginarily possessed. It generates a spirit of trustingness in 

 something or other a very ill, or rather not at all, defined hope in some 

 good luck to happen soon that induces the possessor to frustrate the 

 most laudably-formed progress by delay. Every scheme or measure 

 that prudence from time to time suggests, and reason sanctions, is pro- 

 crastinated, in the expectation that a better will by-and-bye present 

 itself ; and, as nothing usually comes of nothing, the best intentions and 

 cleverest designs, when only thought about, prove in most instances 

 remarkable for their sterility. This was just the case with Mulciber. 

 His happiest conceits and finest devices generally ended just where they 

 began in imagination ; he contented himself with thinking about them, 

 and deferred their execution, in the delusive hope that something more 

 worthy of his energies might emanate soon ; or, if he began at all, it 

 was upon so many excellent things at once, that each retarded and de- 

 feated the perfect accomplishment of all. This versatility of genius 

 mostly destroys its profitableness to the owner, and a poor genius is very 

 apt to doubt the universal fitness of things ; a thousand to one, there- 



