Sterling, of course, had innumerable cares withal; and was toiling like a slave; his very recreations almost a kind of work.

An enormous activity was in the man;--sufficient, in a body that could have held it without breaking, to have gone far, even under the unstable guidance it was like to have! Thus, too, an extensive, very variegated circle of connections was forming round him.

Besides his _Athenaeum_ work, and evenings in Regent Street and elsewhere, he makes visits to country-houses, the Bullers' and others; converses with established gentlemen, with honorable women not a few; is gay and welcome with the young of his own age; knows also religious, witty, and other distinguished ladies, and is admiringly known by them.

On the whole, he is already locomotive; visits hither and thither in a very rapid flying manner.

Thus I find he had made one flying visit to the Cumberland Lake-region in 1828, and got sight of Wordsworth; and in the same year another flying one to Paris, and seen with no undue enthusiasm the Saint-Simonian Portent just beginning to preach for itself, and France in general simmering under a scum of impieties, levities, Saint-Simonisms, and frothy fantasticalities of all kinds, towards the boiling-over which soon made the Three Days of July famous.