44 On the Want of Money. [JAN. 



are not merely respectable, but sacred. Poverty, when it is voluntary, 

 is never despicable, but takes an heroical aspect. What are the begging 

 friars ? Have they not put their base feet upon the necks of princes ? 

 Money as a luxury is valuable only as a passport to respect. It is one 

 instrument of power. Where there are other admitted and ostensible 

 claims to this, it becomes superfluous, and the neglect of it is even ad- 

 mired and looked up to as a mark of superiority over it. Even a 

 strolling beggar is a popular character, who makes an open profession of 

 his craft and calling, and who is neither worth a doit nor in want of 

 one. The Scotch are proverbially poor and proud : we know they can 

 remedy their poverty when they set about it. No one is sorry for 

 them. The French emigrants were formerly peculiarly situated in 

 England. The priests were obnoxious to the common people on 

 account of their religion ; both they and the nobles, for their 

 politics. Their poverty and dirt subjected them to many rebuifs ; 

 but their privations being voluntarily incurred, and also borne with 

 the characteristic patience and good-humour of the nation, screened 

 them from contempt. I little thought, when I used to meet them 

 walking out in the summer's-evenings at Somers' Town, in their 

 long great-coats, their beards covered with snuff, and their eyes gleaming 

 with mingled hope and regret in the rays of the setting sun, and 

 regarded them with pity bordering on respect, as the last filmy vestige 

 of the ancient regime, as shadows of loyalty and superstition still 

 flitting about the earth and shortly to disappear from it for ever, that 

 they would one day return over the bleeding corpse of their country, 

 and sit like harpies, a polluted triumph, over the tomb of human liberty ! 

 To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is perhaps to some temperaments a 

 consummation devoutedly to be wished. There is all the subdued 

 splendour of external rank, the pride of self-opinion, irritated and 

 goaded on by petty privations and vulgar obloquy to a degree of morbid 

 acuteness. Private and public annoyances must perpetually remind him 

 of what he is, of what his ancestors were (a circumstance which might 

 otherwise be forgotten) ; must narrow the circle of conscious dignity 

 more and more, and the sense of personal worth and pretension must 

 be exalted by habit and contrast into a refined abstraction " pure in 

 the last recesses of the mind" unmixed with, or unalloyed by " baser 

 matter !" It was an hypothesis of the late Mr. Thomas Wedge wood, 

 that there is a principle of compensation in the human mind which 

 equalizes all situations, and by which the absence of any thing only 

 gives us a more intense and intimate perception of the reality ; that 

 insult adds to pride, that pain looks forward to ease with delight, that 

 hunger already enjoys the unsavoury morsel that is to save it from 

 perishing ; that want is surrounded with imaginary riches, like the poor 

 poet in Hogarth, who has a map of the mines of Peru hanging on his 

 garret walls ; in short, that " we can hold a fire in our hand by thinking 

 on the frosty Caucasus" but this hypothesis, though ingenious and to 

 a certain point true, is to be admitted only in a limited and qualified 

 sense. 



There are two classes of people that I have observed who are not so 

 distinct as might be imagined those who cannot keep their own money 

 in their hands, and those who cannot keep their hands from other 

 people's. The first are always in want of money, though they do not 

 know what they do with it. They muddle it away, without method or 



