George Eliot

Brother Jacob George Eliot

Among the many fatalities attending the bloom of young desire, that of blindly taking to theconfectionery line has not, perhaps, been sufficiently considered. How is the son of a Britishyeoman, who has been fed principally on salt pork and yeast dumplings, to know that there is satietyfor the human stomach even in a paradise of glass jars full of sugared almonds and pink lozenges, and that the tedium of life can reach a pitch where plum-buns at discretion cease to offer theslightest excitement? Or how, at the tender age when a confectioner seems to him a very princewhom all the world must envy-who breakfasts on macaroons, dines on meringues, sups ontwelfth-cake, and fills up the intermediate hours with sugar-candy or peppermint-how is he toforesee the day of sad wisdom, when he will discern that the confectioner's calling is not sociallyinfluential, or favourable to a soaring ambition? I have known a man who turned out to have ametaphysical genius, incautiously, in the period of youthful buoyancy, commence his career as adancing-master; and you may imagine the use that was made of this initial mistake by opponentswho felt themselves bound to warn the public against his doctrine of the Inconceivable. He couldnot give up his dancing-lessons, because he made his bread by them, and metaphysics would nothave found him in so much as salt to his bread. It was really the same with Mr. David Faux and theconfectionery business. His uncle, the butler at the great house close by Brigford, had made a pet ofhim in his early boyhood, and it was on a visit to this uncle that the confectioners' shops in thatbrilliant town had, on a single day, fired his tender imagination