gainst me. I know that it is
prettier to turn up one's nose at ready cash. I have not found, indeed,
that for the poetical pauper, in his proper person, the world, whether
sentimental or stolid, has any deep reverence. Will old Jacob Plum, who
lives on an unapproachably high avenue,--his house front and his heart
of the same material,--and who made two mints of money in the patent
_poudrette_, come to my shabby little attic in Nassau Street, and ask
me to dinner simply because "The Samos (Ill.) Aristarchean" has spoken
with condescending blandness of my poems? I know that Miss Plum dotes
upon my productions. I know that she pictures me to herself as a
Corydon in sky-blue smalls and broad-brimmed straw hat, playing elegies
in five flats, or driving the silly sheep home through the evening
shades. Now, whatever else I may be, I am not that. I keep my
refinement for gala-days; I do not shave, because I would save
sixpences; I do not wear purple and fine linen. I should be a woful
disappointment to Mistress Plum: for I like beer with my beef, and a
heart-easing tug at my pipe afterwards; and as for the album, we should
never get along at all, for I have too much respect for poetry to write
it for nothing. But if I have not wholly escaped the shiftlessness and
improvidence of my vocation,--if I have never rightly comprehended the
noble maxim, "A penny saved is a penny gained," (which cannot in rigid
mathesis be true, because by saving the penny you miss the enjoyment:
that is, half-and-half, chops, or cheese, which the penny aforesaid
would purchase; so that the penny saved is no better than pebbles which
you may gather by the bushel upon any shore,)--if I like to haunt Old
Tom's, and talk of politics and poetry with the dear shabby set who
nightly gather there, and are so fraternally blind to the holes in each
other's coats,--why it is all a matter between myself and Mrs. Potter,
and perhaps the clock. We have a good, stout, manly supper,--no Apician
kickshaws, the triumphs of palate-science,--no nightingales' tongues,
no peacocks' brains, no French follies,--but just a rasher or so, in
its naked and elegant simplicity. Montaigne's cook, who treated of his
art with a settled countenance and magisterial gravity, would have
turned his nose skyward at our humble repast; and he would have cast
like scorn upon that to which Milton with such charming grace invited
his friend, in one of those matchless sonnets which make us weep to