ad, his table of sham
mahogany, two chairs wretchedly stuffed, and his books--what efforts had
it not cost him!

He was so poor!

Have you ever known any of these indefatigable young students, born in the
humblest ranks, who spend upon their arid labour their ten, their twenty
best years of life, without a thought or a care for the pleasures of their
age or the passing day?--youthful stoics who march with firm step, and
alone, towards an end which, alas! all do not attain!

You have wept at that old drama, that old eternal scene which is recounted
every day--yet not so old, it is renewed also every day:--the bare
chamber, no better than a loft--the truckle-bed--the broken pitcher--the
heap of straw--the sentimental lithographist will not forget the guttering
candle stuck into the neck of a bottle. Thus much for the accessories,
then for the persons of the scene; a workman, the father who expects to
die in the hospital--his four children--always four--who have not broken
their fast that day--and the mother is lying-in with her fifth--and it is
winter, for these poor people choose winter always for their lying-in.

Oh! all this is very true and piteous--I weep with you at the cry of those
suffering children--at the sobs of their mother. Yet there is another
poverty which you know not, which it is never intended that you should
know. A silent poverty that goes dressed in its black coat, polished, it
is true, where polish should not come, and with a slaty hue--produced by
the frequent application of ink to its threadbare surface. It is a
courageous poverty which resists all aid--even from that fictitious fund,
a debt--which dresses itself as you would dress, if your coat were ten
years old--which invites no sympathy--which may be seen in the sombre
evening stopping a moment before the baker's shop, or the wired windows of
the money-changer, but passing on again without a sigh heard. Oh, this
poverty in a black coat! And then it enters into its cold and solitary
chamber, without even the sad consolation of weeping with another. No Lady
Bountiful comes here. In the picture just now described, she would be seen
in the background, entering in at the door, her servant behind loaded with
raiment and provisions. What should she here? What brings you here, madam?
Who could have sent you here? We are rich! If we were poor should we not
sell these books?--all these books are ours; madam, we want nothing. Carry
your amiable charity