ore the
turbot, and without questioning the price, ordered the fish to be sent
to his house. It was M. de Lamartine.

Webster, the American statesman, was afflicted with impecuniosity,
arising from his carelessness about money matters, as well as from his
extravagance. If we are to believe Theodore Parker, Webster, like Bacon,
took bribes. "He contracted debts and did not settle, borrowed and
yielded not again. Private money sometimes clove to his hands.... A
senator of the United States, he was pensioned by the manufacturers of
Boston. His later speeches smell of bribes." Monroe and Jefferson were
always in want of money, and often in debt; though they were both honest
men.

The life which public men lead nowadays, is often an incentive to
excessive expenditure. They may be men of moderate means; they may even
be poor; but not many of them moving in general society have the moral
courage to _seem_ to be so. To maintain their social position, they
think it necessary to live as others do. They are thus drawn into the
vortex of debt, and into all the troubles, annoyances, shabby shifts,
and dishonesties, which debt involves.

Men of science are for the most part exempt from the necessity of
shining in society; and hence they furnish but a small number of
instances of illustrious debtors. Many of them have been poor, but they
have usually lived within their means. Kepler's life was indeed a
struggle with poverty and debt; arising principally from the
circumstance of his salary, as principal mathematician to the Emperor of
Germany, having been always in arrear. This drove him to casting
nativities in order to earn a living. "I pass my time," he once wrote,
"in begging at the doors of crown treasurers." At his death he left only
twenty-two crowns, the dress he wore, two shirts, a few books, and many
manuscripts. Leibnitz left behind him a large amount of debt; but this
may have been caused by the fact that he was a politician as well as a
philosopher, and had frequent occasion to visit foreign courts, and to
mix on equal terms with the society of the great.

Spinoza was poor in means; yet inasmuch as what he earned by polishing
glasses for the opticians was enough to supply his wants, he incurred no
debts. He refused a professorship, and refused a pension, preferring to
live and die independent. Dalton had a philosophical disregard for
money. When his fellow-townsmen at Manchester once proposed to provide
him with an in