fact that riches have wings and use them?  Can you lunch upon vanitas vanitatum?  Are loaves 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 to keep watch and ward after the thief has made his visit leisurely.  ’Tis an egregious chaos.  ’Tis an absurd vacuum.  To make it still more unpleasant, there are your memoranda.  You are reminded that upon Thursday last you purchased butter flavous, or chops rosy; but where is hint, sign, direction, or instruction touching the purchase of either upon Thursday next?  How much would it have helped poor Belisarius, in his sore estate,