52 "HIGH LIFE."
Vaux laughed softly, but with more pensive sadness than
cynical bitterness in the laugh, at the idea of his being of any
service to speak of to the nation. There were better qualified
men than he to do the country's work-men who could stick to
a party, and have all the consistency and combined strength
which such resolute adhesion gave; men not too scrupulous-
not cumbered with a double sight, which saw both sides of a
question, or with a vague, hazy farsightedness-he did not
count it a gain, he was not meaning to praise himself in
reckoning the defects which prevented him from observing
clearly and concisely-which was always anticipating dim
consequences, magnified to giants in their dimness. At the
same time, he really felt he could not work-he could not do
himself or any other body justice in union with fellows who
were tools of a faction, or slaves to a theory; and he was not
such a Don Quixote as to propose to fight the battles of the
country and Parliament single-handed.
 Was it a suggestion of authorship ? He had been a prize-
man at Oxford; he had been fond of making researches in
various fields of intellect; his style, as shown in his letters
when he had been on his travels, had been commended by
distinguished literary men and diners out as the juste milieu
between simplicity and brilliance. The family papers alone
might supply him with delightful subjects for essays.
 De Vaux laughed again, and protested that the world was
too full of books; that the making of books in his generation,
much more than in that of Solomon, was vanity," and he
was not fool enough to add without any distinct calling to
those toppling monster heaps, which, however evanescent,
threatened to crush for the present, by the mere force of num-