r, spasmodic in their way of life. And so it is with
their expenditure. They do not live like other men, and they do not
spend like other men. At one time, you would think, from their lavish
style of living, that they were worth three thousand a year; and at
another, from the privations that they undergo, and the difficulty they
find in meeting small claims upon them, that they were not worth fifty.
There is generally, indeed, large expenditure abroad, and painful
stinting at home. The "res angusta _domi_" is almost always there; but
away from his home, your literary man is often a prince and a
millionaire. Or, if he be a man of domestic habits, if he spends little
on tavern suppers, little on wine, little on cab hire, the probability
is, that he is still impulsive and improvident, still little capable of
self-denial; that he will buy a costly picture when his house-rent is
unpaid; that he will give his wife a guitar when she wants a gown; and
buy his children a rocking-horse when they are without stockings. His
house and family are altogether in an inelegant state of elegant
disorder; and with really a comfortable income, if properly managed, he
is eternally in debt.

Now all this may appear very strange, but it is not wholly
unaccountable. In the _first_ place, it may be assumed, as we have
already hinted, that no small proportion of those who adopt literature
as a profession have enlisted in the army of authors because they have
lacked the necessary amount of patience and perseverance--the systematic
orderly habits--the industry and the self-denial by which alone it is
possible to attain success in other paths of professional life. With
talent enough to succeed in any, they have not had sufficient method to
succeed in any. They have been trained perhaps for the bar, but wanted
assiduity to master the dry details of the law, and patience to sustain
them throughout a long round of briefless circuits. They have devoted
themselves to the study of physic, and recoiled from or broken down
under examination; or wanted the hopeful sanguine temperament which
enables a man to content himself with small beginnings, and to make his
way by a gradually widening circle to a large round of remunerative
practice. They have been intended for the Church, and drawn back in
dismay at the thought of its restraints and responsibilities; or have
entered the army, and have forsaken with impatience and disgust the slow
road to superior comman