Among the many fatalities¹ attending the bloom of young desire, that of blindly taking to the confectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently² considered. How is the son of a British yeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast³ dumplings, to know that there is satiety⁴ for the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium⁵ of life can reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion⁶ cease to offer the slightest excitement? Or how, at the tender age when a confectioner seems to him a very prince whom all the world must envy—who breakfasts on macaroons, dines on meringues, sups on twelfth-cake, and fills up the intermediate hours with sugar-candy or peppermint—how is he to foresee the day of sad wisdom, when he will discern that the confectioner’s calling is not socially influential⁷, or favourable⁸ to a soaring ambition? I have known a man who turned out to have a metaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of youthful buoyancy, commence his career as a dancing-master; and you may imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by opponents who felt themselves bound to warn the public against his doctrine⁹ of the Inconceivable. He could not give up his dancing-lessons, because he made his bread by them, and metaphysics would not have found him in so much as salt to his bread. It was really the same with Mr. David Faux and the confectionery business. His uncle, the butler at the great house close by Brigford, had made a pet of him in his early boyhood, and it was on a visit to this uncle that the confectioners’ shops in that brilliant town had, on a single day, fired his tender imagination. He carried home the pleasing illusion that a confectioner must be at once the happiest and the foremost of men, since the things he made were not only the most beautiful to

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