e lamps
were lit, and the crowds had left the street, would he venture out of
doors, and then merely to take a ten minutes' walk to ease his aching
head, and to rest his wearied eyes. Once he remained three whole days
without tasting food, till a friend accidently came to see him and found
him pale and faint but still writing. Yet in all the sunless gloom of
this dreadful time his letters home were most cheerful. The want of
actual nourishment he felt, the evil influences by which he was
surrounded, the chances of certain success which awaited him if he would
but do violence to a certain portion of his scrupulous orthodoxy,
counted for nothing with one whose good sense could see no grave
inconsistency between temporary poverty and the first efforts of
struggling genius. Nor is poverty so fatal to the efforts of genius as a
superficial thinker would suppose it to be. To a noble nature it
presents no feature of degradation or terror. Its supposed evils are,
for the most part, begotten of the pride of those who are its victims.

If it forbade Griffin to ask or receive favors from those who were able
and willing to help him, it thereby conferred self-independence and
ceaseless energy, the constant forerunners of inevitable success. His
industry was speedily rewarded, and in a manner which seemed the result
rather of good luck than of strenuous effort or personal merit. One day
Gerald made bold to write an article after the manner of those in the
great reviews. He sent it anonymously to the proprietor of a leading
periodical, and in return received unsolicited a cheque for a handsome
sum of money, with an invitation to continue sending contributions of a
similar kind. This was the first hopeful speck in the horizon of a
brilliant future. The benevolence of the kindly publisher did not end
here. He sought out the anonymous writer, invited him to dinner, treated
him handsomely, and obtained for him the editorship of a new
publication. "It never rains but it pours," is a true old maxim
attributable with equal propriety to good and evil happenings. Hitherto
he had been unable to make his time profitable either in a literary or
pecuniary sense. His later contributions had all at once begun to
attract attention, and the amount of time at his disposal seemed too
short to enable him to satisfy all the requirements of numerous
engagements. He was employed as a parliamentary reporter and as a writer
of short plays for the English Oper