University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
The employments of a young gentleman of fortune.

And now, having mentioned tedium of existence
as being an evil to which I soon felt myself subject,
I will say that it was one I found more oppressive
than the reader can readily imagine. I had
nothing in the world to do, and, as it happened, my
disposition did not lead me to seek any thing. I
was, in a word, the very man my sister had so reproachfully
called me in our first conversation—
that is, the laziest man in all Virginia; and, upon
reflection, I can think of no person in the world
who would bear a comparison with me in that particular,
except myself. “None but himself can be
his parallel,” as somebody or other says, I don't
know who, a sentiment that is supposed to be absurd,
inasmuch as it involves an impossibility, but
which becomes good sense when applied to me.
In my original condition, in the body in which I
was first introduced to life, I certainly had a great
aversion to all troublesome employments, whether
of business or amusement, being supposed by many
persons to be then what as many considered me
now—to wit, the laziest man in my state. Whether
I was lazier as Sheppard Lee the Jerseyman or
Arthur Megrim the Virginian, I am not able to say.
In both cases indolence was at the bottom of all

my troubles. There was this difference, however,
between the two conditions, that whereas I had felt
in one the evils of laziness to a poor man, I was
now to discover in the other what were its evils to
a man of fortune.

My chief employments in the body of Mr. Arthur
Megrim were eating and sleeping; and I certainly
should have done nothing else, had I been
allowed to follow my own humours. Eating and
sleeping, therefore, consumed the greater portion
of my time; but it could not consume all; nor
could the residue be filled up by the occasional excursions
in my curricle, and the still more unfrequent
strolls through the village, into which I was
driven by my affectionate sister, or cajoled by her
coadjutor, the doctor, in their zealous care of my
digestive apparatus. As for visits and visitations,
I abhorred them all, whether they related to the
bustling young gentlemen of the neighbourhood, or
the loquacious ladies, old and young, who cultivated
the friendship of my sister.

Employ myself, however, as I might, there always
remained a portion of each day which I could
not get rid of, either in bed or at the table. On
such occasions I was devoured by ennui, and thought
that even existence was an infliction—that it was
hard work to live. According to my sister's account,
I was a scholar and a genius; in which case
I ought to have found employment enough of an
intellectual nature, either in books or the reflections
of my own mind. I certainly had a very large and

fine library in my house, and there was scarce a
week passed by in which I did not receive a huge
bundle of the newest publications from a book-seller,
who had long had it in charge thus to supply
me. Of these I usually read the title-pages, and
then turned them over to my sister, or, which was
more common, lent them to my neighbours, who,
male and female together, came flocking to borrow
the day after, and sometimes the day before, the
arrival of each package, taking good care to rob
me of those that were most interesting. The truth
is, if I ever had had the power of reading, I had
now lost it. Books only set me nodding.

As for exercising my mind in reflections of its
own, that was even more laborious than reading;
and I contracted a dislike to it, particularly as my
mind wore itself out every night in dreaming, that
being a result of the goodly suppers I used to eat.
It is true, that I one day fell into a sudden ferment,
and being inspired, actually seized upon pen and
paper, and wrote a poem in blank verse, forty lines
long, with which I was so pleased that I read it to
Tibbikens and my sister, both of whom were in
raptures with it, the former carrying it off to the
editor of the village paper, who printed it with such
a eulogium upon its merits, as made me believe
Byron was a fool to me, while all the young ladies
immediately paid my sister Ann a visit, that they
might tell me how they admired the beautiful piece,
and lament that I wrote so seldom. I forget what
the poem was about; but I remember I was so

delighted with the praise bestowed on it, that I resolved
to write another, which, however, I did not
do, having unfortunately begun it in rhyme, which
was difficult, and my fit of inspiration and energy
having left me before I got through with my next
dinner. It was my writing verses, I suppose, that
caused me to be called a genius; but it seems I
was too lazy to be inspired more than once or twice
a year.

I relapsed into ennui, and, truly, I became more
tired of it before it was done with me, than was
ever a labourer of his hod or mattock.