vagance,--Cowper characterizing him as "spendthrift alike of money
and of wit." Chatterton, reduced to a state of starvation and despair,
poisoned himself in his eighteenth year. Sir Richard Steele was rarely
out of debt. In many respects he resembled Sheridan in temperament and
character. He was full of speculation, and was always on the point of
some grand stroke of luck, which was to make his fortune. He was
perpetually haunted by duns and bailiffs; yet he did not stint himself
of luxuries so long as he obtained credit. When appointed to the office
of Commissioner of Stamps, with a moderate income, he set up a carriage
with two and sometimes four horses; and he maintained two houses, one in
London, the other at Hampton. His means being altogether inadequate to
this style of living, he soon became drowned in greater debt than
before. He was repeatedly impounded by lawyers, and locked up in
sponging-houses. Executions were put into his houses; his furniture was
sold off; his wife wanted the commonest necessaries of life; and still
the pleasure-loving Steele maintained his equanimity and good temper.
Something great was always on the point of turning up in his favour. One
of his grandest schemes was that for bringing fish alive to the London
market; "and then," said he to his wife, "you will be better provided
for than any lady in England." But the good turn never came to Sir
Richard; and he died out at elbows on his wife's little property in
Wales.

Goldsmith was another of the happy-go-lucky debtors. He swam in debt. He
was no sooner out of it, than he was plunged into it again, deeper than
before. The first money he earned as a tutor--it was all the money he
had--was spent in buying a horse. His relations raised L50, and sent him
to the Temple to study law, but he got no farther than Dublin, where he
spent or gambled away all the money. Then he went to Edinburgh to study
medicine, and was forced to fly from it, having become surety for a
friend. He started on the tour of Europe without any money in his
pocket--with nothing but his flute; and he begged and played, until he
came back to England, as poor as he went. He himself used afterwards to
say that there was hardly a kingdom in Europe in which he was not a
debtor.[1]

[Footnote 1: FORSTER--_Life of Goldsmith_, ed. 1863, p. 41.]

Even when Goldsmith began to earn money freely, he was still in debt. He
gave away with one hand what he earned with the other. He was