a possibility. He is not to
be compared for a moment with a true expert like Sheridan, who
borrowed for borrowing's sake, and without any sordid motive
connected with rents or butchers' bills. Haydon would, indeed, part
with his money as readily as if it belonged to him. He would hear
an "inward voice" in church, urging him to give his last sovereign;
and, having obeyed this voice "with as pure a feeling as ever animated
a human heart," he had no resource but immediately to borrow another.
It would have been well for him if he could have followed on such
occasions the memorable example of Lady Cook, who was so impressed
by a begging sermon that she borrowed a sovereign from Sydney Smith
to put into the offertory; and--the gold once between her
fingers--found herself equally unable to give it or to return it,
so went home, a pound richer for her charitable impulse.

Haydon, too, would rob Peter to pay Paul, and rob Paul without paying
Peter; but it was all after an intricate and troubled fashion of his
own. On one occasion he borrowed ten pounds from Webb. Seven pounds
he used to satisfy another creditor, from whom, on the strength of
this payment, he borrowed ten pounds more to meet an impending bill.
It sounds like a particularly confusing game; but it was a game played
in dead earnest, and without the humorous touch which makes the charm
of Lady Cook's, or of Sheridan's methods. Haydon would have been
deeply grateful to his benefactors, had he not always stood in need
of favours to come. Sheridan might perchance have been grateful,
could he have remembered who his benefactors were. He laid the world
under tribute; and because he had an aversion to opening his
mail,--an aversion with which it is impossible not to
sympathize,--he frequently made no use of the tribute when it was
paid. Moore tells us that James Wesley once saw among a pile of papers
on Sheridan's desk an unopened letter of his own, containing a
ten-pound note, which he had lent Sheridan some weeks before. Wesley
quietly took possession of the letter and the money, thereby raising
a delicate, and as yet unsettled, question of morality. Had he a right
to those ten pounds because they had once been his, or were they not
rather Sheridan's property, destined in the natural and proper order
of things never to be returned.

Yet men, even men of letters, have been known to pay their debts,
and to restore borrowed property. Moore paid Lord Lansdowne every
pen