He owed a tailor a trifle, and a
bootmaker a trifle,--and something to the man who sold gloves and
shirts; and yet he had done his best to keep out of debt with more
than Irish pertinacity, living very closely, breakfasting upon tea
and a roll, and dining frequently for a shilling at a luncheon-house
up a court near Lincoln's Inn. Where should he dine if the
Loughshaners elected him to Parliament? And then he painted to
himself a not untrue picture of the probable miseries of a man who
begins life too high up on the ladder,--who succeeds in mounting
before he has learned how to hold on when he is aloft. For our
Phineas Finn was a young man not without sense,--not entirely a
windbag. If he did this thing the probability was that he might
become utterly a castaway, and go entirely to the dogs before he was
thirty. He had heard of penniless men who had got into Parliament,
and to whom had come such a fate. He was able to name to himself a
man or two whose barks, carrying more sail than they could bear, had
gone to pieces among early breakers in this way. But then, would
it not be better to go to pieces early than never to carry any
sail at all? And there was, at any rate, the chance of success. He
was already a barrister, and there were so many things open to a
barrister with a seat in Parliament! And as he knew of men who had
been utterly ruined by such early mounting, so also did he know of
others whose fortunes had been made by happy audacity when they were
young.
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