Lavengro flies from London and hack authorship, and
takes to the roads from fear of consumption; it is expensive to put
up at inns, and even at public-houses, and Lavengro has not much
money; so he buys a tinker's cart and apparatus, and sets up as
tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a person living in a tent,
or in anything else, must do something or go mad; Lavengro had a
mind, as he himself well knew, with some slight tendency to
madness, and had he not employed himself, he must have gone wild;
so to employ himself he drew upon one of his resources, the only
one available at the time. Authorship had nearly killed him, he
was sick of reading, and had besides no books; but he possessed the
rudiments of an art akin to tinkering; he knew something of
smithery, having served a kind of apprenticeship in Ireland to a
fairy smith; so he draws upon his smithery to enable him to acquire
tinkering, he speedily acquires that craft, even as he had speedily
acquired Welsh, owing to its connection with Irish, which language
he possessed; and with tinkering he amuses himself until he lays it
aside to resume smithery. A man who has an innocent resource, has
quite as much right to draw upon it in need, as he has upon a
banker in whose hands he has placed a sum; Lavengro turns to
advantage, under particular circumstances, a certain resource which
he has, but people who are not so forlorn as Lavengro, and have not
served the same apprenticeship which he had, are not advised to
follow his example.
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