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Updated: May 2, 2025
Frugal enough, hardy enough; urged in every way to look with indifference on hardship, and take a Spartan view of life. Money-allowance completely his own, he does not seem to have had till he was seventeen. Very singular to contemplate, in these days of gold-nuggets and irrational man-mountains fattened by mankind at such a price!
Those things might be didactic, truly, in various points, to this Generation; and worth looking back upon, from its high LAISSEZ-FAIRE altitudes, its triumphant Scrip-transactions and continents of gold-nuggets, pleasing, it doubts not, to all the gods.
For Nature, when she makes a Spartan, means a good deal by it; and does not expect instant applauses, but only gradual and lasting. Which will seem a strange doctrine, in these days of gold-nuggets, railway-fortunes, and miraculous, sumptuosities regardless of expense. Earnest readers are invited to consider it, nevertheless.
"When Candide," says Heine himself, "came to Eldorado, he saw in the streets a number of boys who were playing with gold-nuggets instead of marbles. This degree of luxury made him imagine that they must be the king's children, and he was not a little astonished when he found that in Eldorado gold-nuggets are of no more value than marbles are with us, and that the schoolboys play with them.
It is high time the English were candidly asking themselves, with very great seriousness indeed, WHAT it was they had done, in the sight of God and man, on that and the prior occasion? And above all, What it is they will now propose to do in the sequel of it! Dig gold-nuggets, and rally the IGnoble of us?
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine, a foreigner, when he came to Germany and first read German books. He was perfectly astounded at the wealth of ideas which he found in them; but he soon remarked that ideas in Germany are as plentiful as gold-nuggets in Eldorado, and that those writers whom he had taken for intellectual princes, were in reality only common schoolboys."
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