I chicaned to secure him a fine room, which his lady-mother
furnished "like a bridal chamher", if our Nassau cynics were to be
credited,--introduced him where it was necessary, and exercised generally
towards him that distinguished patronage which one who "knows the ropes" is
able to bestow upon a very Freshman.
A fine generous fellow was Clarian, for all his apron-string
antecedents,--bold as a lion, and as trustworthy as he was enthusiastic.
He was of rather too nervous a temperament to be precisely healthy in all
mental respects, but nevertheless had a fine comprehensive mind, very
capable of sustained and concentrated effort. He had been well taught, and,
unfortunately, was so far advanced beyond the studies of his class as to
have a great deal of leisure. In consequence he turned to reading, and
here, again unfortunately, he put himself under my guidance, and suffered
me to govern him in his choice of books: unfortunately, I say, for I was
then a worshipper of that clay-footed Nebuchadnezzar-image, Metaphysics,
which I fondly deemed all of gold, and the most genuine of things. So, when
Clarian came to me, I was eager enough to put to his lips the wine of which
I was drunken. The boy took his first sip from Coleridge's "Biographia
Literaria",--that cracked Bohemian glass, which, handed in a golden salver
that might have come from the cunning graver of Cellini, yet forces one to
taste, over a flawed and broken edge, the sourest drop of ill-made _vin du
pays_, heavily drugged and made bitter with Paracelsian laudanum.
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