342 THE EULOGY OF RICHARD JEFFERIES. 



has done so much." Yet he forgets to con- 

 sider for how small and select an audience he 

 has written. " All of them have been praised 

 by the reviews. I cannot help feeling it hard, 

 after so much work, to come to such disgrace." 

 It was hard, it was cruelly hard. While the 

 pensions of the Civil List a breach of trust if 

 ever there was one are bestowed upon 

 daughters of distinguished officers and widows 

 of civil servants, such a man as JefFeries, for 

 whose assistance the grant is yearly asked and 

 voted, is left to starve. It is indeed cruelly 

 hard on literature that the rulers of the country 

 should be so blind, so deaf, so pitiless so dis- 

 honest. They made Burns a gauger. Well : 

 that was something. Could they not have made 

 JefFeries a police-constable, for instance 1 They 

 gave him nothing : it would have been useless 

 to ask any Government to give anything : they 

 wanted all the money for persons for whom it 

 was never intended. There never has been 

 there is not now not even at a time when 

 Prime Ministers and ex -Cabinet Ministers 

 write articles for monthly magazines, any 

 Government which has had the least concern 



