ing to his means has always excited the displeasure of
mankind--not only, perhaps, because money kept in store seems for the
time useless, but because if expended it would be very acceptable to its
recipients. The world has commended the man who gives out of his
superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All
literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a
character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over
again on the sword of the satirist.

Meanness has not been confined to the obscure; it has had some
distinguished votaries--as, for example, his Gracious Majesty King James
I., whose economical propensities were notorious. Of him it was
admirably written that

'At Christ Church "Marriage," done before the King,
Lest those learn'd mates should want an offering,
The King himself did offer--What, I pray?
He offer'd, twice or thrice, to go away.'

Take, again, the great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of
mind were very happily hit off in the couplet 'On a High Bridge over a
Small Stream at Blenheim':

'The lofty arch his high ambition shows,
The stream an emblem of his bounty flows.'

Garrick was accused of money-grubbing, and his weakness in that respect
was the subject of more than one smart jest by Foote. When somebody,
_apropos_ of a remark made by Garrick on the parsimony of others,
asked, 'Why on earth doesn't Garrick take the beam out of his own eye
before attacking the mote in other people's?'--Foote replied, 'He is not
sure of selling the timber.' And again, when Garrick, after dropping a
guinea and failing to find it, said it had 'gone to the devil, he
thought,' Foote remarked, 'Well, David, let you alone for making a
guinea go farther than anybody else'--a repartee which was perhaps in
the mind of Shirley Brooks when, referring to the excellence of Scotch
shooting at long distances, he wrote:

'But this we all knew
That a Scotchman can do--
Make a small piece of metal go awfully far.'

Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose
unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat
department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an 'Inquest
Extraordinary':

'Found dead, a rat--no case could sure be harder:
Verdict--Confined a week in Eldon's larder.'

We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over
the proper p