Bradley, when Bradley was headmaster of Marlborough, and said
grimly one evening that he envied Bradley, with all his heart, his
life of hard, fruitful, necessary work, and owned that he sometimes
felt about his own poetry, what, after all, did all this elaborate
versifying amount to, and who was in any way the better or happier
for it?

The truth is that the man of letters forgets that this is exactly
the same thought as that which haunts the busy man after, let us
say, a day of looking over examination-papers or attending
committees. The busy man, if he reflects at all, is only too apt to
say to himself, "Here have I been slaving away like a stone-
breaker, reading endless scripts, discussing an infinity of petty
details, and what on earth is the use of it all?" Yet Sir Alfred
Lyall once said that if a man had once taken a hand in big public
affairs, he thought of literature much as a man who had crossed the
Atlantic in a sailing-yacht might think of sculling a boat upon the
Thames. One of the things that moved Dr. Johnson to a tempest of
wrath was when on the death of Lord Lichfield, the Lord Chancellor,
Boswell said to him that if he had taken to the law as a
profession, he might have been Lord Chancellor, and with the same
title. Johnson was extremely angry, and said that it was unfriendly
to remind a man of such things when it was too late.

One may conclude from such incidents and confessions that even some
of the most eminent men of letters have been haunted by the sense
that in following literature they have not chosen the best part,
and that success in public life is a more useful thing as well as
more glorious.