ially where
it happens to be calumnious, I beg not to be supposed a believer in the
common stories current about Sheridan's carelessness of pecuniary
obligations. So far from 'never paying,' which is what public slander
has not ceased to report of him, he was (in Mr. Moore's language)
'_always_ paying;' and for once that he paid too little, a thousand
times he paid a great deal too much. Had, indeed, all his excesses of
payment been gathered into one fund, that fund would have covered his
deficits ten times over. It is, however, true that, whilst he was
continually paying the hundred-pound demands against him, with all their
Jewish accumulations of interest, he was continually unfurnished with
money for his 'menus plaisirs' and trifling personal expenses.

By strong natural tendency of disposition, Sheridan was a man of
peculiarly sensitive honour, and the irregularities into which he fell,
more conspicuously after the destruction of Drury Lane by fire, pained
nobody so much as himself. It is the sense of this fact, and the belief
that Sheridan was never a defaulter through habits of self-indulgence,
which call out in _my_ mind a reaction of indignation at the stories
current against him.

_Bookbinding and Book-Lettering._--Literature is a mean thing enough in
the ordinary way of pursuing it as what the Germans call a
_Brodstudium_; but in its higher relations it is so noble that it is
able to ennoble other things, supposing them in any degree ministerial
to itself. The paper-maker, ergo the rag-maker, ergo the linen
cloth-maker, is the true and original creator of the modern press, as
the Archbishop of Dublin long ago demonstrated. For the art of printing
had never halted for want of the typographic secret; _that_ was always
known, known and practised hundreds of years before the Christian era.
It halted for want of a material cheap enough and plentiful enough to
make types other than a most costly substitute for hand-copying. Do you
hear _that_, gentlemen blockheads, that seldom hear anything but
yourselves? Next after the paper-maker, who furnished the _sine qua
non_, takes rank, not the engraver or illustrator (our modern novelist
cannot swim without this caricaturing villain as one of his bladders;
all higher forms of literature laugh at him), but the binder; for he, by
raising books into ornamental furniture, has given even to
non-intellectual people by myriads a motive for encouraging literature
and an intere