igations never to cease, and take care you shall
owe no one else a good turn; and provided you are compelled or contented
to remain always in poverty, obscurity, and disgrace, they will continue
your very good friends and humble servants to command, to the end of
the chapter. The tenure of these indentures is hard. Such persons
will wilfully forfeit the gratitude created by years of friendship, by
refusing to perform the last act of kindness that is likely ever to be
demanded of them: will lend you money, if you have no chance of repaying
them: will give you their good word, if nobody will believe it; and the
only thing they do not forgive is an attempt or probability on your
part of being able to repay your obligations. There is something
disinterested in all this: at least, it does not show a cowardly
or mercenary disposition, but it savours too much of arrogance and
arbitrary pretension. It throws a damning light on this question, to
consider who are mostly the subjects of the patronage of the great, and
in the habit of receiving cards of invitation to splendid dinners. I
confess, for one, I am not on the list; at which I do not grieve much,
nor wonder at all. Authors, in general, are not in much request. Dr.
Johnson was asked why he was not more frequently invited out; and he
said, 'Because great lords and ladies do not like to have their mouths
stopped.' Garrick was not in this predicament: he could amuse the
company in the drawing-room by imitating the great moralist and
lexicographer, and make the negro-boy in the courtyard die with laughing
to see him take off the swelling airs and strut of the turkey-cock. This
was clever and amusing, but it did not involve an opinion, it did not
lead to a difference of sentiment, in which the owner of the house might
be found in the wrong. Players, singers, dancers, are hand and glove
with the great. They embellish, and have an _eclat_ in their names,
but do not come into collision. Eminent portrait-painters, again, are
tolerated, because they come into personal contact with the great; and
sculptors hold equality with lords when they have a certain quantity
of solid marble in their workshops to answer for the solidity of their
pretensions. People of fashion and property must have something to show
for their patronage, something visible or tangible. A sentiment is a
visionary thing; an argument may lead to dangerous consequences,
and those who are likely to broach either one or t