without his services in
the Circumlocution Office, than they can tolerate his fractious spirits.
He poisons life at the well-head. It is better to be beggared out of
hand by a scapegrace nephew, than daily hag-ridden by a peevish uncle.

And what, in God's name, is all this pother about? For what cause do
they embitter their own and other people's lives? That a man should
publish three or thirty articles a year, that he should finish or not
finish his great allegorical picture, are questions of little interest
to the world. The ranks of life are full; and although a thousand fall,
there are always some to go into the breach. When they told Joan of Arc
she should be at home minding women's work, she answered there were
plenty to spin and wash. And so, even with your own rare gifts! When
nature is "so careless of the single life," why should we coddle
ourselves into the fancy that our own is of exceptional importance?
Suppose Shakespeare had been knocked on the head some dark night in Sir
Thomas Lucy's preserves, the world would have wagged on better or worse,
the pitcher gone to the well, the scythe to the corn, and the student to
his book; and no one been any the wiser of the loss. There are not many
works extant, if you look the alternative all over, which are worth the
price of a pound of tobacco to a man of limited means. This is a
sobering reflection for the proudest of our earthly vanities. Even a
tobacconist may, upon consideration, find no great cause for personal
vainglory in the phrase; for although tobacco is an admirable sedative,
the qualities necessary for retailing it are neither rare nor precious
in themselves. Alas and alas! you may take it how you will, but the
services of no single individual are indispensable. Atlas was just a
gentleman with a protracted nightmare! And yet you see merchants who go
and labour themselves into a great fortune and thence into the
bankruptcy court; scribblers who keep scribbling at little articles
until their temper is a cross to all who come about them, as though
Pharaoh should set the Israelites to make a pin instead of a pyramid;
and fine young men who work themselves into a decline, and are driven
off in a hearse with white plumes upon it. Would you not suppose these
persons had been whispered, by the Master of the Ceremonies, the promise
of some momentous destiny? and that this lukewarm bullet on which they
play their farces was the bull's-eye and centre-point of all t