a price
himself, and as he would have done to a bookseller. And when in debt and
in prison, though he knew a line to Egerton would have extricated him,
he never wrote that line. He would depend alone on his pen,--dipped it
hastily in the ink, and scrawled himself free. The most debased point
about him was certainly the incorrigible vice of drinking, and with it
the usual concomitant of that vice,--the love of low company. To be King
of the Bohemians, to dazzle by his wild humour, and sometimes to exalt
by his fanciful eloquence, the rude, gross natures that gathered round
him,--this was a royalty that repaid him for all sacrifice of solid
dignity; a foolscap crown that he would not have changed for an
emperor's diadem. Indeed, to appreciate rightly the talents of John
Burley, it was necessary to hear him talk on such occasions. As a
writer, after all, he was now only capable of unequal desultory efforts;
but as a talker, in his own wild way, he was original and matchless. And
the gift of talk is one of the most dangerous gifts a man can possess
for his own sake,--the applause is so immediate, and gained with so
little labour. Lower and lower and lower had sunk John Burley, not only
in the opinion of all who knew his name, but in the habitual exercise of
his talents. And this seemed wilfully--from choice. He would write for
some unstamped journal of the populace, out of the pale of the law, for
pence, when he could have got pounds from journals of high repute. He
was very fond of scribbling off penny ballads, and then standing in the
street to hear them sung. He actually once made himself the poet of an
advertising tailor, and enjoyed it excessively. But that did not last
long, for John Burley was a Pittite,--not a Tory, he used to say, but
a Pittite. And if you had heard him talk of Pitt, you would never have
known what to make of that great statesman. He treated him as the German
commentators do Shakspeare, and invested him with all imaginary meanings
and objects, that would have turned the grand practical man into a
sibyl. Well, he was a Pittite; the tailor a fanatic for Thelwall and
Cobbett. Mr. Burley wrote a poem wherein Britannia appeared to the
tailor, complimented him highly on the art he exhibited in adorning the
persons of her sons; and bestowing upon him a gigantic mantle, said that
he, and he alone, might be enabled to fit it to the shoulders of living
men. The rest of the poem was occupied in Mr. Snip's unava