and the extravagant; expensive indulgences had been
made necessary to him by habit; and, when in the year
1798, or thereabouts, he had to choose between a bit
of bacon, a scrag of mutton, and a lodging at ten
shillings a week, on the one side, and made-dishes,
wine, a fine house and a footman on the other side,
he chose the latter. He became the servile Editor
of CANNING’S Anti-jacobin newspaper; and he,
who had more wit and learning than all the rest of
the writers put together, became the miserable tool
in circulating their attacks upon everything that
was hostile to a system which he deplored and detested.
But he secured the made-dishes, the wine, the footman
and the coachman. A sinecure as ’
clerk
of the Foreign Estreats,’ gave him 329_l._
a year, a double commissionership of the lottery gave
him 600_l._ or 700_l._ more; and, at a later period,
his Editorship of the Quarterly Review gave him perhaps
as much more. He rolled in his carriage for several
years; he fared sumptuously; he was buried at
Westminster
Abbey, of which his friend and formerly his brother
pamphleteer in defence of PITT was the
Dean;
and never is he to be heard of more! Mr. GIFFORD
would have been full as happy; his health would have
been better, his life longer, and his name would have
lived for ages, if he could have turned to the bit
of bacon and scrag of mutton in 1798; for his learning
and talents were such, his reasonings so clear and
conclusive, and his wit so pointed and keen, that his
writings must have been generally read, must have been
of long duration! and, indeed, must have enabled him
(he being always a single man) to live in his latter
days in as good style as that which he procured by
becoming a sinecurist, a pensioner and a
hack,
all which he was from the moment he lent himself to
the Quarterly Review. Think of the mortification
of such a man, when he was called upon to justify the
power-of-imprisonment bill in 1817! But to go
into particulars would be tedious: his life was
a life of luxurious misery, than which a worse is
not to be imagined.
57. So that poverty is, except where there is
an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more
imaginary than real. The shame of poverty,
the shame of being thought poor, is a great and fatal
weakness, though arising, in this country, from the
fashion of the times themselves. When a good
man, as in the phraseology of the city, means a
rich man, we are not to wonder that every one
wishes to be thought richer than he is. When
adulation is sure to follow wealth, and when contempt
would be awarded to many if they were not wealthy,
who are spoken of with deference, and even lauded
to the skies, because their riches are great and notorious;
when this is the case, we are not to be surprised that
men are ashamed to be thought to be poor. This
is one of the greatest of all the dangers at the outset
of life: it has brought thousands and hundreds
of thousands to ruin, even to pecuniary ruin.