I have walked my
last in the domains I have planted--sat the last time in the halls I have
built. But death would have taken them from me, if misfortune had spared
them. My poor people whom I loved so well! There is just another die to
turn up against me in this run of ill-luck, i. e. if I should break my
magic wand in the fall from this elephant, and lose my popularity with my
fortune. Then _Woodstock_ and _Boney_" [his life of Napoleon] "may both go
to the paper-maker, and I may take to smoking cigars and drinking grog, or
turn devotee and intoxicate the brain another way."[52] He adds that when
he sets to work doggedly, he is exactly the same man he ever was, "neither
low-spirited nor _distrait_," nay, that adversity is to him "a tonic and
bracer."
The heaviest blow was, I think, the blow to his pride. Very early he
begins to note painfully the different way in which different friends
greet him, to remark that some smile as if to say, "think nothing
about it, my lad, it is quite out of our thoughts;" that others adopt
an affected gravity, "such as one sees and despises at a funeral," and
the best-bred "just shook hands and went on.
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