life!  I remember a curious instance to the contrary of this.  In the old days of sailing-packets a country gentleman embarked for Ireland, and when a few miles from land broke a bloodvessel through seasickness.  A doctor on board pronounced that he would certainly die before the completion of the voyage if it was continued; whereupon the sick man’s friends consulted with the captain, who convoked the passengers, and persuaded them to accept compensation in proportion to their needs for allowing the vessel to be put back; which was accordingly done.

One of the most popular fictions of our time was even written with this very moral, that life is unpurchasable.  Yet nothing is more certain than that life is often lost through want of money—­that is, of the obvious means to save it.  In such a case how truly has it been written that ’the destruction of the poor is their poverty’!  This, however, is scarcely a pinch, but, to those who have hearts to feel it, a wrench that ’divides asunder the joints and the marrow.’

A nobler example, because a less personal one, of the pinch of poverty, is when it prevents the accomplishment of some cherished scheme for the benefit of the human race.  I have felt such a one myself when in extreme youth I was unable, from a miserable absence of means, to publish a certain poem in several cantos.  That the world may not have been much better for it if I had had the means does not affect the question.  It is easy to be incredulous.  Henry VII. of England did not believe in the expectations of Columbus, and suffered for it, and his case may have been similar to that of the seven publishers to whom I applied in vain.

A man with an invention on which he has spent his life, but has no means to get it developed for the good of humanity—­or even patented for himself—­must feel the pinch of poverty very acutely.

To sum up the matter, the longer I live, the more I am convinced that the general view in respect to material means is a false one.  That great riches are a misfortune is quite true; the effect of them in the moral sense (with here and there a glorious exception, however) is deplorable:  a shower of gold falling continuously upon any body (or soul) is as the waters of a petrifying spring.  But, on the other hand, the occasional and precarious dripping of coppers has by no means a genial effect.  If the one recipient becomes hard as the nether millstone, the other (just as after constant ‘pinching’ a limb becomes insensible) grows callous, and also (though it seems like a contradiction in terms) sometimes acquires a certain dreadful suppleness.  Nothing is more monstrous than the generally received opinion with respect to a moderate competence; that ‘fatal gift,’ as it is called, which encourages idleness in youth by doing away with the necessity for exertion.  I never hear the same people inveighing against great inheritances, which are much more open to such objections.