Page:Vivian Grey, Volume 1.djvu/50

 conceived. At the end of twelve months, Vivian, like many other young enthusiasts, had discovered that all the wit and wisdom of the world were concentrated in some fifty antique volumes, and he treated the unlucky moderns with the most sublime spirit of hauteur imaginable. A chorus in the Medea, that painted the radiant sky of Attica, disgusted him with the foggy atmosphere of Great Britain; and while Mrs. Grey was meditating a séjour at Brighton, her son was dreaming of the gulf of Salamis. The spectre in the Pers was his only model for a ghost, and the furies in the Agamemnon were his perfection of tragical machinery.

Most ingenious and educated youths have fallen into the same error; but few, I trust, have ever carried such feelings to the excess that Vivian Grey did; for while his mind was daily becoming more enervated under the beautiful but baneful influence of the youth lighted upon.