522 The March of Mind : [Nov. 



acquainted with the author. This, by her brother's intervention, was 

 Boon brought about ; an invitation to dinner confirmed the intimacy ; the 

 , lady, like Dcsdcmoiia, loved the Wanderer " for the perils Jie had passed ;" 

 and he, like Othello, " loved her that she did pity them." It has been 

 well said, one marriage makes many : scarcely had his sister embraced 

 the nuptial state, when Thomas handed to the same altar a widow lady, 

 whom he had accidentally met at ftlargate, and had mistaken for a person 

 of quality, but who had since turned out to be the leading tragic actress of 

 Sadler's Wells, at a rising salary of eighteen shillings per week, exclusive 

 of benefits. It is but justice to add, that if this young lady brought her 

 husband no fortune, she brought him, what to a sensitive mind is infi- 

 nitely preferable, two fine boys, one of whom was breeched, the other 

 yet in petticoats. 



Such accumulated incidents — calamities he ungratefully called them — 

 occurring to old Spimkins at a period Avhen the mind, having lost the 

 first elasticity of youth, is not yet mellowed down into the philosophy of 

 age, but stands, restless and unsettled, between the two, in a sort of 

 crepuscular condition, heaped " sackcloth and ashes on his head." He 

 neglected his ledger, lie neglected his house, he neglected liimself, and, 

 worst of all, he neglected his customers. In fact, for months together, 

 he did nothing but sigh and swear. His family, even in this exigency, 

 could render him not the slightest assistance. His daughter, who still 

 lived with him, had, by a diligent cultivation of the intellect, long since 

 forgotten the houseliold duties of a wife ; her husband, as the old man 

 used often to remark, " was of no more use tlian a cargo of damaged 

 coffee ;" and even Thomas — the inspired Thomas himself — had dwindled 

 down into a mere mortal, and now dwelt in aerial seclusion up two pair 

 of stairs at Pentonville. Thus widowed in his age — for his wife, I 

 should observe, had three months since transferred herself from his to 

 Abraham's bosom — the disconsolate grocer abruptly sold his business, 

 pensioned off his daughter and her " AViinderer," and retired alone, on 

 a small annuity, to a back street in Islington — a memorable illustration 

 of the March of JMind and its very peculiar concomitants. 



Here it was that I first became acquainted with him, and gleaned the 

 particulars of the history I have just ventured to sketch. Our intimacy 

 continued upwards of a year, during which period I will do my old 

 friend the justice to say, that I heard the anecdote of the poetic appren- 

 tice who had robbed him, at least a dozen times. Now and then, when 

 I ventured to express my astonishment that a tradesman of his good 

 sense, who held such proper notions on the score of poetry and punc- 

 tuality, should have so far forgotten himself as to have encouraged the 

 one, and abandoned t;ie other, to his own manifest ruin, the venerable 

 sage would answei', " True, Sir, but it was all my wife's doing. She 

 kept perpetually telling me that the Spinkses — who, one Avould have 

 thought must have been good judges, for they were capital customers, 

 and always paid their way — had pronounced my son to be a genius, and 

 that it was a shame to thwart his abilities ; so I was over-persuaded, 

 you see, to send him to college, when, had he but stuck to business, who 

 knows but he miglit have become a common-coimcilman ; or, perhaps, 

 even in time a sheriff! But there's no doing any thing with poets. I 



remember an apprentice of mine, once But I see you're affected !" 



— and here the old man would pause, shake the ashes from his pipe, and 

 then revert to some less ungracious topic. It was on one of tliese occa- 

 sions, when, having concluded a longer story than usual, he had stopped 

 to take his customary allowance of breath, that on waking from a nap 



