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 think that the author did not write a hundred of them.  But Montaigne’s cook may follow his first master, the late Cardinal Caraffa, to that place where there will always be fire for his saucepans!  The epicures of Old Tom’s would deal very crisply with that spit-bearing Italian, or his shade, should it appear to them.  We are not very polished, but most of us could give hints to men richer than we can hope to be of a wiser use of money than the world is in any danger of witnessing.  There is Old Sanders, the proof-reader,—­“Illegitimate S.” we call him,—­who knows where there is an exquisite black-letter Chaucer which he pants to possess, and which he would possess, were it not for a fear of Mrs. Sanders and a tender love of the little Sanderses.  There is young Smooch,—­he who smashed the Fly-Gallery in “The Mahlstick” newspaper, and was not for a moment taken in by the new Titian.  There is Crosshatch, who has the marvellous etching by Rembrandt, of which there are only three copies in the world, and which he will not sell,—­no, Sir,—­not to the British Museum.  There is Mr. Brevier Lead, who has in my time successively and successfully smitten and smashed all the potentates, big and little, of Europe, and who has in his museum a wooden model of the Alsop bomb.  Give them money, and Sanders will rebuild and refurnish the Alexandrian Library,—­Smooch will bid every young painter in America reset his palette and try again,—­and Brevier Lead will be fool enough to start a newspaper upon his own