Stretton by Henry Kingsley

That Roland behaved like a fool I do not deny. Had he made such a fool of himself at thirty, he would not have been worth writing about. But he was only twenty-one.

In looking for a precedent for his remarkable conduct, just look at your own conduct when you were twenty-one. Did you not do things then that you would not do now? Did you not do generous and carelessly foolish things which you would not do now? Why, I who speak, know well a man with an estate of eight thousand a-year--a shrewd, sensible fellow enough in most things, yet a man who is not given to spend money on himself, who has crippled himself for the best part of his life by an act of careless, fantastic generosity, wilder in one way than Roland's. In the Australian madness of 1852, how many men do I know who, sick of things here, gave up safe positions in England out of the pure old English spirit of adventure? How many? As many as were Mrs. Nickleby's lovers.