oaves
and fishes intrinsically wicked? As for Virtue, we have the opinion of
Horace himself, that it is viler than the vilest weed, without fortune
to support it. Poets, of all men, are supposed to live most easily upon
air; and yet, Don Bob, is not a fat poet, like Jamie Thomson, quite
likely, although plumper than beseems a bard, to be ten thousand times
healthier in his singing than my Lord Byron thinning himself upon cold
potatoes and vinegar? Do you think that Ovid cuts a very respectable
figure, blubbering on the Euxine shore and sending penitential letters
to Augustus and afterward to Tiberius? He was a poor puppy, and as well
deserved to have three wives as any sinner I ever heard of. Don't you
think, that, if the cities of Smyrna, Chios, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodes,
Argos, and Athens had given over disputing about the birthplace of the
author of the "Iliad" and other poems, and had "pooled in" a handsome
sum to send him to a blind asylum, it would have been a sensible
proceeding? Do you think Milton would have written less sublimely, if
he had been more prosperous? Do you think Otway choking, or Hudibras
Butler dying by inches of slow starvation, pleasant to look upon? Are
we to keep any terms with the thin-visaged jade, Poverty, after she has
broken down a great soul like John Dryden's? That is a very foolish
notion which has so long and so universally prevailed, that a poet
must, by the necessity of the case, be poor. David was reckoned an
eminent bard in his day, and he was a king; and Solomon, another sweet
singer, was a king also. Depend upon it, no man sings, or thinks, or,
if he be a man, works, the worse for being tolerably provided for in
basket and pocket-money.

Objectively considered, I say that there is not in this world a sadder
sight, one so touchingly suggestive of departed joys, departed never to
return, as a pocketbook, flat, planed, exenterated, crushed by the
elephantine foot of Fate,--nor is there one so ridiculous, inutile,
impertinent, possibly reproachful and disagreeably didactic. Think of
it, Don Bob,--for you in your day, as I in mine, have seen it. 'Tis so
much leather stripped from the innocent beast, and cured and colored
and polished and stamped to no purpose,--with a prodigious show of
empty compartments, like banquet-halls deserted. It has a clasp to
mount guard over nothing,--a clasp made of steel digged from the bowels
of the earth, and smelted and hammered and burnished, only t