THE POOR POET. 45 



tailor on the first floor exemplified by a flourishing trade, that 

 '' clothes make the man; "while a pawn-broker in the shop 

 below, proved beyond a doubt, by his golden rule of three, that 

 "money makes the man/' It followed, therefore, that our 

 hapless scribbler, scant of " money, " scant of " clothes, " and, 

 from an awkward consciousness of such deficiencies, by no means 

 free and easy in his " manners," was set down by his land- 

 lord, the man of money, and by his fellow lodgers, the man of 

 catgut, and the man of cloth, as nothing like a man at all, but 

 a mere bubble, as aforesaid, in the scum of society. 



Yet as bubbles, even soap bubbles, will sometimes rise 

 heavenwards with a luminous display of rainbow colours, so there 

 were seasons when the spirits of this nonentity would rise from 

 his sky-parlour to the sky above him, and return with some 

 obsolete and child-like notion that " God makes the man, " and 

 that he had been made in a mould at least as perfect as his 

 fellows. There were moments, even, when this inflating con- 

 sciousness would come drest in prismatic hues, and when the 

 same nonentity would fondly fancy that the sun of the world 

 now hidden from his view behind the clouds of friendlessness 

 and want, would one day burst forth upon the bubbles of his 

 fancy, as they ascended, balloon-like, amidst the applause of 

 approving thousands. 



Poor H was a worker in the tread-mill of low periodicals, 

 wherein, for ever climbing, each weary round of the month and 

 year left him just where he was at the beginning; but in spite 



