"either
be a dirty scoundrel or starve?" One thing, however, is certain, which
is, that Lavengro did not accept the office, which if a love for what is
low had been his ruling passion he certainly would have done;
consequently, he refuses to do one thing which no genteel person would
willingly do, even as he does many things which every genteel person
would gladly do, for example, speaks Italian, rides on horseback,
associates with a fashionable young man, dines with a rich genius, et
cetera. Yet--and it cannot be minced--he and gentility with regard to
many things are at strange divergency; he shrinks from many things at
which gentility placidly hums a tune, or approvingly simpers, and does
some things at which gentility positively shrinks. He will not run into
debt for clothes or lodgings, which he might do without any scandal to
gentility; he will not receive money from Francis Ardry, and go to
Brighton with the sister of Annette Le Noir, though there is nothing
ungenteel in borrowing money from a friend, even when you never intend to
repay him, and something poignantly genteel in going to a watering-place
with a gay young Frenchwoman; but he has no objection, after raising
twenty pounds by the sale of that extraordinary work "Joseph Sell," to
set off into the country, mend kettles under hedge-rows, and make pony
and donkey shoes in a dingle. Here, perhaps, some plain, well-meaning
person will cry--and with much apparent justice--how can the writer
justify him in this act? What motive, save a love for what is low, could
induce him to do such a thing? Would the writer have everybody who is in
need of recreation go into the country, mend kettles under hedges, and
make pony shoes in dingles? To such an observation the writer would
answer, that Lavengro had an excellent motive in doing what he did, but
that the writer is not so unreasonable as to wish everybody to do the
same. It is not everybody who can mend kettles. It is not everybody who
is in similar circumstances to those in which Lavengro was. Lavengro
flies from London and hack authorship, and takes to the roads from fear
of consumption; it is expensive to put up at inns, and even at public-
houses, and Lavengro has not much money; so he buys a tinker's cart and
apparatus, and sets up as tinker, and subsequently as blacksmith; a
person living in a tent, or in anything else, must do something or go
mad; Lavengro had a mind, as he himself well knew, with s