1827.] On the Want of Money. 41 



and one of the three was out of his mind and crazy, and his great delight 

 was, when the others fell asleep, to tweak their noses, and flourish his 

 night-cap over their heads, so that they were obliged to lie awake, and 

 hold him down between them. One should be quite mad to bear this. 

 To what a point of insignificance may not human life dwindle ! To what 

 fine, agonizing threads will it not cling ! Yet this man had been a lover 

 in his youth, in a humble way, and still begins his letters to an old-maid 

 (his former flame), who sometimes comforts him by listening to his 

 complaints, and treating him to a dish of weak tea, " MY DEAR Miss 

 NANCY I" ' 



Another of the greatest miseries of a want of money, is the tap of a 

 dun at your door, or the previous silence when you expect it the 

 uneasy sense of shame at the approach of your tormentor ; the wish to 

 meet, and yet to shun the encounter ; the disposition to bully ; the fear 

 of irritating ; the real and the sham excuses ; the submission to imper- 

 tinence ; the assurances of a speedy supply ; the disingenuousness you 

 practise on him and on yourself; the degradation in the eyes of others 

 and your own. Oh ! it is wretched to have to confront a just and oft- 

 repeated demand, and to be without the means to satisfy it ; to deceive 

 the confidence that has been placed in you ; to forfeit your credit ; to be 

 placed at the power of another, to be indebted to his lenity ; to stand 

 convicted of having played the knave or the fool ; and to have no way 

 left to escape contempt, but by incurring pity. The suddenly meeting 

 a creditor on turning the corner of a street, whom you have been trying 

 to avoid for months, and had persuaded you were several hundred miles 

 off, discomposes the features and shatters the nerves for some time. It 

 is also a serious annoyance to be unable to repay a loan to a friend, who 

 is in want of it nor is it very pleasant to be so hard-run, as to be induced 

 to request the repayment. It is difficult to decide the preference between 

 debts of honour and legal demands ; both are bad enough, and almost a 

 fair excuse for driving any one into the hands of money-lenders to whom 

 an application, if successful, is accompanied with a sense of being in 

 the vulture's gripe - a reflection akin to that of those who formerly sold 

 themselves to the devil or, if unsuccessful, is rendered doubly galling 

 by the smooth, civil leer of cool contempt with which you are dismissed, 

 as if they had escaped from your clutches not you from their's. If any 

 thing can be added to the mortification and distress arising from straitened 

 circumstances, it is when vanity comes in to barb the dart of poverty 

 when you have a picture on which you had calculated, rejected from an 

 Exhibition, or a manuscript returned on your hands, or a tragedy 

 damned, at the very instant when your cash and credit are at the lowest 

 ebb. This forlorn and helpless feeling has reached its acme in the prison- 

 scene in Hogarth's RAKE'S PROGRESS, where his unfortunate hero has 

 just dropped the Manager's letter from his hands, with the laconic 

 answer written in it : " Your play has been read, and won't do."* To 

 feel poverty is bad ; but to feel it with the additional sense of our inca- 

 pacity to shake it off, and that we have not merit enough to retrieve our 

 circumstances and, instead of being held up to admiration, are exposed 

 to persecution and insult is the last stage of human infirmity. My 

 friend, Mr. Leigh Hunt (no one is better qualified than he to judge) 



* It is provoking enough, and makes one look like a fool, to receive a printed notice 

 of a blank in the last lottery, with a postscripUioping for your future favours. 



M.M. New Series. VoL.III. No.is' G 



