ance of cash, will do
little towards the business. On the whole, one is weary of hearing
about the omnipotence of money. I will say rather that, for a genuine
man, it is no evil to be poor; that there ought to be Literary Men
poor,--to show whether they are genuine or not! Mendicant Orders,
bodies of good men doomed to _beg_, were instituted in the Christian
Church; a most natural and even necessary development of the spirit of
Christianity. It was itself founded on Poverty, on Sorrow,
Contradiction, Crucifixion, every species of worldly Distress and
Degradation. We may say, that he who has not known those things, and
learned from them the priceless lessons they have to teach, has missed
a good opportunity of schooling. To beg, and go barefoot, in coarse
woollen cloak with a rope round your loins, and be despised of all the
world, was no beautiful business;--nor an honourable one in any eye,
till the nobleness of those who did so had made it honoured of some!

Begging is not in our course at the present time: but for the rest of
it, who will say that a Johnson is not perhaps the better for being
poor? It is needful for him, at all rates, to know that outward
profit, that success of any kind is _not_ the goal he has to aim at.
Pride, vanity, ill-conditioned egoism of all sorts, are bred in his
heart, as in every heart; need, above all, to be cast-out of his
heart,--to be, with whatever pangs, torn-out of it, cast-forth from
it, as a thing worthless. Byron, born rich and noble, made-out even
less than Burns, poor and plebeian. Who knows but, in that same 'best
possible organisation' as yet far off, Poverty may still enter as an
important element? What if our Men of Letters, Men setting-up to be
Spiritual Heroes, were still _then_, as they now are, a kind of
'involuntary monastic order;' bound still to this same ugly
Poverty,--till they had tried what was in it too, till they had
learned to make it too do for them! Money, in truth, can do much, but
it cannot do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it; and
even spurn it back, when it wishes to get farther.

Besides, were the money-furtherances, the proper season for them, the
fit assigner of them, all settled,--how is the Burns to be recognised
that merits these? He must pass through the ordeal, and prove himself.
_This_ ordeal; this wild welter of a chaos which is called Literary
Life; this too is a kind of ordeal! There is clear truth in the idea
that a str