crawling betwixt heaven
and earth';--'coining our hearts for drachmas'; now scorched in the sun,
now shivering in the breeze, now coming out in our newest gloss and best
attire, like swallows in the spring, now 'sent back like hollowmas or
shortest day'? The best wits, like the handsomest faces _upon the town,_
lead a harassing, precarious life--are taken up for the bud and promise
of talent, which they no sooner fulfil than they are thrown aside
like an old fashion--are caressed without reason, and insulted with
impunity--are subject to all the caprice, the malice, and fulsome
advances of that great keeper, the Public--and in the end come to no
good, like all those who lavish their favours on mankind at large, and
look to the gratitude of the world for their reward. Instead of this set
of Grub Street authors, the mere _canaille_ of letters, this corporation
of Mendicity, this ragged regiment of genius suing at the corners of
streets in _forma pauperis,_ give me the gentleman and scholar, with a
good house over his head and a handsome table 'with wine of Attic taste'
to ask his friends to, and where want and sorrow never come. Fill up the
sparkling bowl; heap high the dessert with roses crowned; bring out the
hot-pressed poem, the vellum manuscripts, the medals, the portfolios,
the intaglios--this is the true model of the life of a man of taste and
_virtu_--the possessors, not the inventors of these things, are the true
benefactors of mankind and ornaments of letters. Look in, and there,
amidst silver services and shining chandeliers, you will see the man
of genius at his proper post, picking his teeth and mincing an opinion,
sheltered by rank, bowing to wealth--a poet framed, glazed, and hung
in a striking light; not a straggling weed, torn and trampled on; not
a poor _Kit-run-the-street,_ but a powdered beau, a sycophant plant, an
exotic reared in a glass case, hermetically sealed,

Free from the Sirian star and the dread thunder-stroke

whose mealy coat no moth can corrupt nor blight can wither. The poet
Keats had not this sort of protection for his person--he lay bare to
weather--the serpent stung him, and the poison-tree dropped upon this
little western flower: when the mercenary servile crew approached him,
he had no pedigree to show them, no rent-roll to hold out in reversion
for their praise: he was not in any great man's train, nor the butt and
puppet of a lord--he could only offer them 'the fairest flowers o