"Well," said Mordaunt, and a momentary light flashed over his
countenance, "the effort will be made. I do not pretend not to have
felt ambition. No man should make it his boast, for it often gives to
our frail and earth-bound virtue both its weapon and its wings; but
when the soil is exhausted its produce fails; and when we have forced
our hearts to too great an abundance, whether it be of flowers that
perish or of grain that endures, the seeds of after hope bring forth
but a languid and scanty harvest. My earliest idol was ambition; but
then came others, love and knowledge, and afterwards the desire to
bless. That desire you may term ambition: but we will suppose them
separate passions; for by the latter I would signify the thirst for
glory, either in evil or in good; and the former teaches us, though by
little and little, to gain its object, no less in secrecy than for
applause; and Wisdom, which opens to us a world, vast, but hidden from
the crowd, establishes also over that world an arbiter of its own, so
that its disciples grow proud, and, communing with their own hearts,
care for no louder judgment than the still voice within. It is thus
that indifference not to the welfare but to the report of others grows
over us; and often, while we are the most ardent in their cause, we
are the least anxious for their esteem."

"And yet," said Lord Ulswater, "I have thought the passion for esteem
is the best guarantee for deserving it."

"Nor without justice: other passions may supply its place, and produce
the same effects; but the love of true glory is the most legitimate
agent of extensive good, and you do right to worship and enshrine it.
For me it is dead: it Survived--ay, the truth shall out!--poverty,
want, disappointment, baffled aspirations,--all, all, but the
deadness, the lethargy of regret when no one was left upon this