1827.] On the Want of Money. 39 



person of my acquaintance some years ago. He was not only poor but 

 a very poor creature, as will be imagined. His wife had laid by four- 

 pence (their whole remaining stock) to pay for the baking of a shoulder 

 of mutton and potatoes, which they had in the house, and on her return 

 home from some errand, she found he had expended it in purchasing a 

 new string for a guitar. On this occasion a witty friend quoted the lines 

 from Milton : 



" And ever against eating cares, 



Wrap me in soft Lydian airs !" 



DEFOE, in his Life of Colonel Jack, gives a striking picture of his 

 young beggarly hero sitting with his companion for the first time in 

 his life at a three-penny ordinary, and the delight with which he relished 

 the hot smoking soup, and the airs with which he called about him 

 " and every time," he says, " we called for bread, or beer, or whatever 

 it might be, the waiter answered, * coming, gentlemen, coming ;' and this 

 delighted me more than all the rest I" It was about this time, as 

 the same pithy author expresses it, " the Colonel took upon him to 

 wear a shirt !" Nothing can be finer than the whole of the feeling 

 conveyed in the commencement of this novel, about wealth and finery 

 from the immediate contrast of privation and poverty. One would 

 think it a labour, like the Tower of Babel, to build up a beau and a fine 

 gentleman about town. The little vagabond's admiration of the old 

 man at the banking-house, who sits surrounded by heaps of gold as if 

 it were a dream or poetic vision, and his own eager anxious visits, day 

 by day, to the hoard he had deposited in the hollow tree, are in the very 

 foremost style of truth and nature. See the same intense feeling ex- 

 pressed in Luke's address to his riches in the City Madam, and in the 

 extraordinary raptures of the " Spanish Rogue" m contemplating and 

 hugging his ingots of pure gold and Spanish pieces of eight : to which 

 Mr. Lamb has referred in excuse for the rhapsodies of some of our 

 elder poets on this subject, which to our present more refined and tamer 

 apprehensions sound like blasphemy.* In earlier times, before the dif- 

 fusion of luxury, of knowledge, and other sources of enjoyment had 

 become common, and acted as a diversion to the cravings of avarice, 

 the passionate admiration, the idolatry, the hunger and thirst of wealth 

 and all its precious symbols, was a kind of madness or hallucination, and 

 Mammon was truly worshipped as a god ! 



It is among the miseries of the want of money, not to be able to pay 

 your reckoning at an inn or, if you have just enough to do that, to have 

 nothing left lor the waiter ; to be stopped at a turnpike gate, and 

 forced to turn back ; not to venture to call a hackney-coach in a shower 

 of rain (when you have only one shilling left yourself, it is a bore to 

 have it taken out of your pocket by a friend, who comes into your house 

 eating peaches in a hot summer's-day, and desiring you to pay for the 

 coach in which he visits you) ; not to be able to purchse a lottery-ticket, 

 by which you might make your fortune, and get out of all your difficul- 

 ties ; or to find a letter lying for you at a country post-office, and not to 

 have money in your pocket to free it, and be obliged to return'for it the 

 next day. The letter so unseasonably withheld may be supposed to con- 

 tain money, and in this case there is a foretaste, a sort of actual possession 



* Shylock's lamentation over the loss of " his daughter and his ducats," is another 

 case in point. 



