THE POOR POET. 45 



tailor on the first floor exemplified by a flourishing trade, that 

 " clothes make the man ;" while a pawn-broker in the shop 

 below, proved beyond a doubt, by his golden rule of three, 

 that "money makes the man." It followed, therefore, that 

 our hapless scribbler, scant of " money," scant of " clothes," 

 and, from an awkward consciousness of such deficiencies, by 

 no means free and easy in his " manners," was set down by 

 his landlord, the man of money, and by his fellow lodgers, the 

 man of catgut, and the man of cloth, as nothing like a man at 

 all, but a mere bubble, as aforesaid, in the scum of society. 



Yet as bubbles, even soap bubbles, will sometimes rise 

 heavenwards with a luminous display of rainbow colours, so 

 there were seasons when the spirits of this nonentity would 

 rise from his sky-parlour to the sky above him, and return 

 with some obsolete and child-like notion that " Grod makes the 

 man," and that he had been made in a mould at least as per- 

 fect as his fellows. There were moments, even, when this 

 inflating consciousness would come drest in prismatic hues, 

 and when the same nonentity would fondly fancy that the sun 

 of the world now hidden from his view behind the clouds of 

 friendlessness and want, would one day burst forth upon the 

 bubbles of his fancy, as they ascended, balloon-like, amidst 

 the applause of approving thousands. 



Poor H was a worker in the tread-mill of low periodicals, 

 wherein, forever climbing, each weary round of the month and 

 year left him just where he was at the beginning ; but in spite 



