Note 6 — Chapter III · 1830.

"A youth who has completed his 18th year within 100 hours of his writing this advertisement, wishing to make head against the res angusta domi, hereby TENDERS his CAPACITIES to any honourable patronage which the chapter of accidents may raise up in his behoof. Born to better hopes, his bringing up has not been wholly neglected, and he would fain apply some of the little items of his unpretending culture towards honest advancement in a life which even his short experience has proved to be not altogether unchequered—the mind's eye irresistably glancing at an example which recent events have revived and made too memorable to be overlooked by such a votary to fortune as the advertiser; to wit, the august example of King Philip the first,[6] who when, in "the turns of chance below," even his star was dimmed, did not disdain to extract independent maintenance from knowledge which, in his early days, he had learnt as mere ornament. Far from aiming, like the variously accomplished Duke of Orleans, at geometry, or the sublimer sciences, the humble advertiser ventures to hope that his tolerable, hourly improving fluency in French, Italian, and modern Greek (the latter language now become of increased English interest from the increase of English colonization in the Mediterranean), would enable him to give lessons, and materially conduce to perfect pupils in each of these branches, at most moderate remuneration. That same Mediterranean has been the sad cause of this advertisement. Nearly 1900 years after the prince of Latian poets wrote his description of the storm which, all but, engulfed Æneas and his followers—that description which, from Homer to Shakespeare, from Shakespeare to the present hour, the universe of poetry has never equalled—even in that very part of that very sea, a sudden springing up of that wind, which, though the desire and delight of northern regions, is proverbial for storms (creber procellis Africus) not confined to illustrating the poet's text, in abruptly shrouding a shipful of 'noble creatures' from the sight of the clouds, from the face of heaven and the light of day, not confined to a presentiment of instant death to all on shipboard, but in rending reality, depriving every soul of clouds, of light and life, by sinking the whole in fell ocean, without a single survivor—the advertiser's dear father (an English functionary in the Ionian Islands) being one of the sufferers—leaving his son a burden, where he would be an alleviator, to the most affectionate of mothers. A statement of other capabilities, penmanship, arithmetic, etc., is forborne, because they may be implied. Indeed, friends, too partial, no doubt, imagine that to any mission, especially southward, the advertiser might be a not ineligible appendage. At all events, he thus adventures his speculation, trusting its result to 'the caterer for the sparrow.'"