1827.] [ 35. ] 



ON THE WANT OF MONEY. 



IT is hard to be without money. To get on without it is like 

 travelling in a foreign country without a passport you are stopped, 

 suspected, and made ridiculous at every turn, besides being subjected 

 to the most serious inconveniences. The want of money I here allude 

 to is not altogether that which arises from absolute poverty for where 

 there is a downright absence of the common necessaries of life, this 

 must be remedied by incessant hard labour, and the least we can 

 receive in return is a supply of our daily wants but that uncertain, 

 casual, precarious mode of existence, in which the temptation to spend 

 remains after the means are exhausted, the want of money joined with 

 the hope and possibility of getting it, the intermediate state of difficulty 

 and suspense between the last guinea or shilling and the next that we 

 may have the good luck to encounter. This gap, this unwelcome in- 

 terval constantly recurring, however shabbily got over, is really full of 

 many anxieties, misgivings, mortifications, meannesses, and deplorable 

 embarrassments of every description. I may attempt (this essay is not 

 a fanciful speculation) to enlarge upon a few of them. 



It is hard to go without one's dinner through sheer distress, but 

 harder still to go without one's breakfast. Upon the strength of that 

 first and aboriginal meal, one may muster courage to face the difficulties 

 before one, and to dare the worst : but to be roused out of one's warm 

 bed, and perhaps a profound oblivion of care, with golden dreams (for 

 poverty does not prevent golden dreams), and told there is nothing for 

 breakfast, is cold comfort for which one's half-strung nerves are not 

 prepared, and throws a damp upon the prospects -of the day. It is a 

 bad beginning. A man without a breakfast is a poor creature, unfit to 

 go in search of one, to meet the frown of the world, or to borrow a 

 shilling of a friend. He may beg at the corner of a street nothing 

 is too mean for the tone of his feelings robbing on the highway is out 

 of the question, as requiring too much courage, and some opinion of a 

 man's self. It is, indeed, as old Fuller, or some worthy of that age, 

 expresses it, " the heaviest stone which melancholy can throw at a 

 man," to learn, the first thing after he rises in the morning, or even to 

 be dunned with it in bed, that there is no loaf, tea, or butter in the 

 house, and that the baker, the grocer, and butterman have refused to 

 give any farther credit. This is taking one sadly at a disadvantage. 

 It is striking at one's spirit and resolution in their very source, the 

 stomach it is attacking one on the side of hunger and mortification 

 at once ; it is casting one into the very mire of humility and Slough 

 of Despond. The worst is, to know what face to put upon the matter, 

 what excuse to make to the servants, what answer to send to the 

 tradespeople ; whether to laugh it off, or be grave, or angry, or indif- 

 ferent ; in short, to know how to parry off an evil which you cannot 

 help. What a luxury, what a God's-send in such a dilemma, to find a 

 half-crown which had slipped through a hole in the lining of your 

 waistcoat, a crumpled bank-note in your breeches-pocket, or a guinea 

 clinking in the bottom of your trunk, which had been thoughtlessly left 

 there out of a former heap ! Vain hope ! Unfounded illusion ! The 

 experienced in such matters know better, and- laugh in their sleeves at 

 so improbable a suggestion. Not a corner, not a cranny, not a pocket, 



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