alary for it; but lived merely on his Bedfordshire estates,
and as Snigsby irreverently expresses it, "by chewing his own cud." And,
sure enough, if any man might chew the cud of placid reflections, solid
Howard, a mournful man otherwise, might at intervals indulge a little
in that luxury.--No money-salary had he for his work; he had merely the
income of his properties, and what he could derive from within. Is this
such a sublime distinction, then? Well, let it pass at its value. There
have been benefactors of mankind who had more need of money than he, and
got none too. Milton, it is known, did his _Paradise Lost_ at the
easy rate of five pounds. Kepler worked out the secret of the Heavenly
Motions in a dreadfully painful manner; "going over the calculations
sixty times;" and having not only no public money, but no private
either; and, in fact, writing almanacs for his bread-and-water, while
he did this of the Heavenly Motions; having no Bedfordshire estates;
nothing but a pension of 18 pounds (which they would not pay him), the
valuable faculty of writing almanacs, and at length the invaluable
one of dying, when the Heavenly bodies were vanquished, and battle's
conflagration had collapsed into cold dark ashes, and the starvation
reached too high a pitch for the poor man.

Howard is not the only benefactor that has worked without money for us;
there have been some more,--and will be, I hope! For the Destinies are
opulent; and send here and there a man into the world to do work,
for which they do not mean to pay him in money. And they smite him
beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight his world all into grim
frozen ruins round him,--and can make a wandering Exile of their Dante,
and not a soft-bedded Podesta of Florence, if they wish to get a _Divine
Comedy_ out of him. Nay that rather is their way, when they have worthy
work for such a man; they scourge him manifoldly to the due pitch,
sometimes nearly of despair, that he may search desperately for his
work, and find it; they urge him on still with beneficent stripes when
needful, as is constantly the case between whiles; and, in fact, have
privately decided to reward him with beneficent death by and by, and not
with money at all. O my benevolent friend, I honor Howard very much;
but it is on this side idolatry a long way, not to an infinite, but to
a decidedly finite extent! And you,--put not the modest noble Howard, a
truly modest man, to the blush, by forcing t