le the
man who spreads its fame over the world is left to gather his
contemplations over a stove in an attic, watch the visage of his
landlady, and shudder at the rise of coals!

'England, with all thy faults I love thee still.'

But it must be confessed, that thou art the most pitiful, paltry,
beggarly, blind--" I shall say no more. Thy whole munificence, thy whole
magnanimity, thy whole generosity, to the living lights of thy sullen
region of toil, trimming, and tribulation, of the dulness of dukes and
the mountainous fortunes of pinmakers--is exactly L1200 a-year! and this
to be divided among the whole generation of the witty and the wise, of
the sons and daughters of the muse,--the whole "school of the prophets,"
the lustres of the poetry and the science of England! L1200 a-year for
the only men of their generation who will be remembered for five minutes
by the generation to come. L1200 a-year, the salary of an Excise
commissioner, of a manipulator of the penny post, of a charity
inspector, of a police magistrate, of a register of cabs, of any thing
and every body: and this, reduced to decimals, is to be the national
prize, the luxurious provision, the brilliant prospect, the illustrious
tribute of a treasury of fifty millions sterling a-year, to the whole
literature of a land which boasts of its being the intellectual leader
of the world!

I have found the poems of our living bards on the shores of Hudson's
Bay, and heard men talking of them round a stove, while the thermometer
outside the window was 30 deg. below zero. I have found them in a
plantain-thatched hovel on the banks of the Niger, and forgotten while I
read them that the thermometer was 110 deg. in the shade. I have found them
in the hands of a learned pundit on the banks of the Ganges, whom they
were seducing into dreams of dewy pastures and crystal rills. And one of
the pleasantest evenings I ever remember to have spent, was, by the help
of the "Lay of the Last Minstrel," as I sat at a supper of rice milk,
after a day of fire on the eastern branch of the Nile, a thousand miles
above Tourists, sheltered under the wagon of a Moorish ambassador from
Sultaun Abderahman to the monarch of Gondar. "England!" exclaimed this
ebony-visaged worshipper of the Beaux Arts, as he displayed the volume
before me. It was the only civilised word in his vocabulary. But I felt
the compliment with patriotic fervency, and in spirit thanked the bard
for the barbarian