e there is in the starting point
and in the employment of the faculties between a Duc de Luynes and a
Senancour." How many of the most distinguished authors have been
dependent upon private means, not simply for physical sustenance, but
for the opportunities which they afforded of gaining that experience of
life which was absolutely essential to the full growth of their mental
faculties. Shelley's writings brought him no profit whatever, and
without a private income he could not have produced them, for he had not
a hundred buyers. Yet his _whole time_ was employed in study or in
travel, which for him was study of another kind, or else in the actual
labor of composition. Wordsworth tried to become a London journalist and
failed. A young man called Raisley Calvert died and left him 900_l._;
this saved the poet in Wordsworth, as it kept him till the publication
of the "Lyrical Ballads," and afterwards other pieces of good luck
happened to him, so that he could think and compose at leisure. Scott
would not venture to devote himself to literature until he had first
secured a comfortable income outside of it. Poor Kepler struggled with
constant anxieties, and told fortunes by astrology for a livelihood,
saying that astrology as the daughter of astronomy ought to keep her
mother; but fancy a man of science wasting precious time over
horoscopes! "I supplicate you," he writes to Moestlin, "if there is a
situation vacant at Tuebingen, do what you can to obtain it for me, and
let me know the prices of bread and wine and other necessaries of life,
for my wife is not accustomed to live on beans." He had to accept all
sorts of jobs; he made almanacs, and served any one who would pay him.
His only tranquil time for study was when he lived in Styria, on his
wife's income, a tranquillity that did not last for long, and never
returned. How different is this from the princely ease of Tycho Brahe,
who labored for science alone, with all the help that the ingenuity of
his age could furnish! There is the same contrast, in a later
generation, between Schiller and Goethe. Poor Schiller "wasting so much
of his precious life in literary hack-work, translating French books for
a miserable pittance;" Goethe, fortunate in his pecuniary independence
as in all the other great circumstances of his life, and this at a time
when the pay of authors was so miserable that they could hardly exist by
the pen. Schiller got a shilling a page for his translations