Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

CARELESS YOUTH. 255
advantage of remaining on the spot and continuing
in the same circle of adherents and friends, and was
thus a more prevailing presence than his more exact
and less accidental comrade and coadjutor. They
were both, when they began the work of life, as
little systematic, as careless of all rule, as can be
conceived. It was the joy and glory of youth in
those days to win its honours and attain its effects
with almost an affectation of idleness and indifference
to any serious motive. I do not know whether there
was so much more force of impulse and energy in the
generation that this was the expression of a natural
tendency or the sign of their special stage of develop-
ment. I am free to confess that to account for it
in this way seems to me the mere jargon of science
applied to matters with which it has little to do.
And we may admit that there is still a prejudice in
the youthful mind in favour of prizes lightly won, and
of the young hero who never seems to work, yet gaily
gains the reward of work by some dazzling impossi-
bility which delights his companions. Alas ! I fear
that it is now his stupid companions, the comrades
of his pleasures, who are delighted ; and that virtuous
youth, to which the labour is the great thing, and the
reward more or less professedly indifferent if not given
as the recompense of struggle and effort, is of quite
another way of thinking.
But in those days there was no perpetual and ever-
repeated ordeal of examinations, and perhaps there
was a certain advantage in the fact that brilliant
natural faculties sometimes won the day over that
perseverance and steadfast plodding which is our re-
formed ideal nowadays. Wilson was one of the most