Chapter 1 - Page 2

they
will inflict no pain; and how seldom can they converse with those whose
minds have toiled for their delight without doing either the one or the
other.

In the better and wiser tone of feeling with Ovid only expresses in one
line to retract in that which follows, I can address these quires--

Parve, nec invideo, sine me, liber, ibis in urbem.

Nor do I join the regret of the illustrious exile, that he himself could
not in person accompany the volume, which he sent forth to the mart
of literature, pleasure, and luxury. Were there not a hundred similar
instances on record, the rate of my poor friend and school-fellow, Dick
Tinto, would be sufficient to warn me against seeking happiness in the
celebrity which attaches itself to a successful cultivator of the fine
arts.

Dick Tinto, when he wrote himself artist, was wont to derive his origin
from the ancient family of Tinto, of that ilk, in Lanarkshire, and
occasionally hinted that he had somewhat derogated from his gentle blood
in using the pencil for his principal means of support. But if Dick's
pedigree was correct, some of his ancestors must have suffered a more
heavy declension, since the good man his father executed the necessary,
and, I trust, the honest, but certainly not very distinguished,
employment of tailor in ordinary to the village of Langdirdum in the
west.. Under his humble roof was Richard born, and to his father's
humble trade was Richard, greatly contrary to his inclination, early
indentured. Old Mr. Tinto had, however, no reason to congratulate
himself upon having compelled the youthful genius of his son to forsake
its natural bent. He fared like the school-boy who attempts to stop with
his finger the spout of a water cistern, while the stream, exasperated
at this compression, escapes by a thousand uncalculated spurts, and wets
him all over for his pains. Even so fared the senior Tinto, when his
hopeful apprentice not only exhausted all the chalk in making sketches
upon the shopboard, but even executed several caricatures of his
father's best customers, who began loudly to murmur, that it was too
hard to have their persons deformed by the vestments of the father, and
to be at the same time turned into ridicule by the pencil of the son.
This led to discredit and loss of practice, until the old tailor,
yielding to destiny and to the entreaties of his son, permitted him to
attempt his fortune in a line for which he was better qualified.

There was about this time, in the village of Langdirdum, a peripatetic
brother of the brush, who exercised his vocation sub Jove frigido, the
object of admiration of all the boys of the village, but especially
to Dick Tinto. The age had not yet adopted, amongst other unworthy