cast will soon be forsaken even by himself! his
own intellect will be clouded over, and his limbs shrink in the palsy of
bodily misery and shame--

Malesuada Fames, et turpis Egestas
Terribiles visu formae.

Not that in this history of men of genius we are without illustrious
examples of those who have even _learnt to want,_ that they might
emancipate their genius from their necessities!

We see ROUSSEAU rushing out of the palace of the financier, selling his
watch, copying music by the sheet, and by the mechanical industry of two
hours, purchasing ten for genius. We may smile at the enthusiasm of young
BARRRY, who finding himself too constant a haunter of taverns, imagined
that this expenditure of time was occasioned by having money; and to put
an end to the conflict, he threw the little he possessed at once into the
Liffey; but let us not forget that BARRY, in the maturity of life,
confidently began a labour of years,[A] and one of the noblest inventions
in his art--a great poem in a picture--with no other resource than what
he found by secret labours through the night, in furnishing the shops with
those slight and saleable sketches which secured uninterrupted mornings
for his genius. SPINOSA, a name as celebrated, and perhaps as calumniated,
as Epicurus, lived in all sorts of abstinence, even of honours, of
pensions, and of presents; which, however disguised by kindness, he would
not accept, so fearful was this philosopher of a chain! Lodging in a
cottage, and obtaining a livelihood by polishing optical glasses, he
declared he had never spent more than he earned, and certainly thought
there was such a thing as superfluous earnings. At his death, his small
accounts showed how he had subsisted on a few pence a-day, and

Enjoy'd, spare feast! a radish and an egg.

[Footnote A: His series of pictures for the walls of the meeting-room of
the Society of Arts in the Adelphi.--ED.]

POUSSIN persisted in refusing a higher price than that affixed to the back
of his pictures, at the time he was living without a domestic. The great
oriental scholar, ANQUETIL DE PERRON, is a recent example of the literary
character carrying his indifference to privations to the very cynicism of
poverty; and he seems to exult over his destitution with the same pride as
others would expatiate over their possessions. Yet we must not forget, to
use the words of Lord Bacon, that "judging that means were to be spent
upon learning, and not l