know the unutterable romances perpetrated for
ever in our most populous empire, under cloud of night and distance and
utter poverty, Mark _that_--of utter poverty. Wealth is power; but it is
a jest in comparison of poverty. Splendour is power; but it is a joke to
obscurity. To be poor, to be obscure, to be a baker's apprentice or a
tailor's journeyman, throws a power about a man, clothes him with
attributes of ubiquity, _really_ with those privileges of concealment
which in the ring of Gyges were but fabulous. Is it a king, is it a
sultan, that such a man rivals? Oh, friend, he rivals a spiritual power.

Two men are on record, perhaps many more _might_ have been on that
record, who wrote so many books, and perpetrated so many pamphlets, that
at fifty they had forgotten much of their own literary villainies, and
at sixty they commenced with murderous ferocity a series of answers to
arguments which it was proved upon them afterwards that they themselves
had emitted at thirty--thus coming round with volleys of small shot on
their own heads, as the Whispering Gallery at St. Paul's begins to
retaliate any secrets you have committed to its keeping in echoing
thunders after a time, or as Sir John Mandeville under Arctic skies
heard in May all those curses thawing, and exploding like minute-guns,
which had been frozen up in November. Even like those self-replying
authors, even like those self-reverberators in St. Paul's, even like
those Arctic practitioners in cursing, who drew bills and _post obits_
in malediction, which were to be honoured after the death of winter,
many men are living at this moment in merry England who have figured in
so many characters, illustrated so many villages, run away from so many
towns, and performed the central part in so many careers, that were the
character, the village, the town, the career, brought back with all its
circumstances to their memories, positively they would fail to recognise
their own presence or incarnation in their own acts and bodies.

We have all read the story told by Addison of a sultan, who was
persuaded by a dervish to dip his head into a basin of enchanted water,
and thereupon found himself upon some other globe, a son in a poor
man's family, married after certain years the woman of his heart, had a
family of seven children whom he painfully brought up, went afterwards
through many persecutions, walked pensively by the seashore meditating
some escape from his miseries, b