man into bad company," Pen said. "It is easy to cry
'Fie!' against a poor fellow who has no society but such as he finds in
a prison; and no resource except forgetfulness and the bottle. We must
deal kindly with the eccentricities of genius, and remember that
the very ardour and enthusiasm of temperament which makes the author
delightful often leads the man astray."

"A fiddlestick about men of genius!" Warrington cried out, who was
a very severe moralist upon some points, though possibly a very had
practitioner. "I deny that there are so many geniuses as people who
whimper about the fate of men of letters assert there are. There are
thousands of clever fellows in the world who could, if they would, turn
verses, write articles, read books, and deliver a judgment upon
them; the talk of professional critics and writers is not a whit more
brilliant, or profound, or amusing, than that of any other society of
educated people. If a lawyer, or a soldier, or a parson, outruns his
income, and does not pay his bills, he must go to gaol; and an author
must go, too. If an author fuddles himself, I don't know why he should
be let off a headache the next morning,--if he orders a coat from the
tailor's, why he shouldn't pay for it."

"I would give him more money to buy coats," said Pen, smiling. "I suppose
I should like to belong to a well-dressed profession. I protest against
that wretch of a middle-man whom I see between Genius and his great
landlord, the Public, and who stops more than half of the labourer's
earnings and fame."

"I am a prose labourer," Warrington said; "you, my boy, are a poet in a
small way, and so, I suppose, consider you are authorised to be flighty.
What is it you want? Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be
forced to purchase the works of all authors, who may present themselves,
manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who
can or can't spell, and produces his novel or his tragedy,--are they
all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless
reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good or bad, saleable or
otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave, in fine, to purchase or not?
Why, sir, when Johnson sate behind the screen at Saint John's Gate, and
took his dinner apart, because he was too shabby and poor to join the
literary bigwigs who were regaling themselves, round Mr. Cave's best
table-cloth, the tradesman was doing him no wrong. You couldn't force