hile you write, you are no genius; you
are not fit to be an author. I write because it rejoices me, because it
is my nature. Written, I care no more what becomes of it than the lark
for the effect that the song has on the peasant it wakes to the plough.
The poet, like the lark, sings 'from his watch-tower in the skies.' Is
this true?"

"Yes, very true!"

"What can rob us of this joy? The bookseller will not buy; the
public will not read. Let them sleep at the foot of the ladder of the
angels,--we climb it all the same. And then one settles down into such
good-tempered Lucianic contempt for men. One wants so little from them,
when one knows what one's self is worth, and what they are. They are
just worth the coin one can extract from them, in order to live.

"Our life--that is worth so much to us. And then their joys, so vulgar
to them, we can make them golden and kingly. Do you suppose Burns
drinking at the alehouse, with his boors around him, was drinking, like
them, only beer and whiskey? No, he was drinking nectar; he was imbibing
his own ambrosial thoughts,--shaking with the laughter of the gods.
The coarse human liquid was just needed to unlock his spirit from the
clay,--take it from jerkin and corduroys, and wrap it in the 'singing
robes' that floated wide in the skies: the beer or the whiskey needed
but for that, and then it changed at once into the drink of Hebe. But
come, you have not known this life,--you have not seen it. Come, give
me this night. I have moneys about me,--I will fling them abroad as
liberally as Alexander himself, when he left to his share but hope.
Come!"

"Whither?"

"To my throne. On that throne last sat Edmund Kean, mighty mime! I am
his successor. We will see whether in truth these wild sons of genius,
who are cited but 'to point a moral and adorn a tale,' were objects of
compassion. Sober-suited tits to lament over a Savage or a Morland, a
Porson and a Burns!"

"Or a Chatterton," said Leonard, gloomily.

"Chatterton was an impostor in all things; he feigned excesses that he
never knew. He a bacchanalian, a royster! HE! No. We will talk of him.
Come!"

Leonard went.

CHAPTER XXI.

The Room! And the smoke-reek, and the gas glare of it! The whitewash of
the walls, and the prints thereon of the actors in their mime-robes, and
stage postures,--actors as far back as their own lost Augustan era, when
the stage was a real living influence on the manners and the age! There
w