Poets. Did they ever abound more than at present? Will some kind, real satirist be good enough to come forward and fustigate them into a sense of shame, and a knowledge of their own position as average rate-paying Christians? Was there ever a time when they more needed the warning hammered into them half a century since by one who was no poet, but who, unless I greatly err, has since become one of the greatest men of letters, lawyers, and sages that the world has seen? Say, was it Brougham, or was it Jeffrey, who wrote, "We really cannot permit all the shallow coxcombs who languish under the burden of existence to take themselves for spell-bound geniuses. The most powerful stream, indeed, will stagnate the most deeply, and will burst out to more wild devastation when obstructed in its peaceful course; but the weakly current is, upon the whole, more liable to obstruction, and will mantle and rot, at least, as dismally as its betters. The innumerable blockheads, in short, who betake themselves to suicide, dram-drinking, and dozing in dirty nightcaps, will not allow us to suppose that there is any real connection between ennui and talent, or that fellows who are fit for nothing better than mending shoes or cracking stones may not be very miserable if they are unfortunately raised above their proper occupations."*

Tottlepot and Clidger,-the one with his poetry, the other with his grievances, together with the silent misery of the little old snuffy Marquis de la Vieille Roche, and the beards and bluster of the foreign democratic element, were not very conducive to Ruthyn Pendragon's peace of mind. But for the cheapness of the chambers, he might have been speedily tempted to leave them; but he found companions less demonstrative, and, ultimately, two or three almost congenial to his ways of thought. There was a quiet population of broken-down tradesmen, clerks timewan and shattered, yet still able to scrape a weekly subsistence by making up the books of butchers and tailors in the evening and collecting debts. There were a few small commission-agents, who were satisfied with their legitimate gains, and therefore did not prosper much. There was a reduced farmer named Cherfit-one of those sad spectacles, a fat man grown thin, and whose skin was as baggy as the clothes he wore. A great speculation in corn, or hops, or clover, had made him bankrupt; but he had not lost his equanimity. He calmly remembered the days when he used to farm a thousand acres; was perfectly contented with criticising the points of the cab and cart horses he saw passing the window; was almost an infallible judge of the weather; was a stanch Protectionist, and assiduously perused the prices current of those markets whose fluctuations were nothing to him now. Add to these, if you please, a dapper little man, whose name was, aptly enough, Mr. Smart, who had taught writing, arithmetic, and the use of the globes any time these fifty years in ladies' schools, chiefly in the neighbourhood of Cam

*Edinburgh Review, 1818.

berwell and Kensington; a wan, sunburnt man, who had been agent for a Chinese opium house at Canton for many years, who had not made a fortune out of that traffic, and was suspected of habitually chewing the narcotic drug in which he had once dealt; and a superannuated theatrical prompter, whose sight was now too bad to enable him to "hold the book," who was, to his great good luck, "on the Fund," and who was looked upon as an infallible authority as to new pieces and first appearances: he never went to the theatre, but attended the performances through the intermediary of a newspaper, and always with a saving clause, disparaging to the present state of the drama, and laudatory of those glorious days when John Kemble and Jack Bannister, Joey Munden and Jerry Sneak Russell, flourished. In what manner of gyrations do people flourish, I wonder?-angularly, or in curves, or in "parabolic envelopes," as that unexpected comet, the other day, is said to have done.

Ah! let me no forget; there was an artist, too, at the chambers. His name was Clere ;-John Clere-nothing more. He was so desperately poor, and so painfully struggling an artist, that he should properly have lived in a garret, worn a threadbare black-velvet coat, continually smoked a short pipe, abused the Hanging Committee of the Royal Academy, and the extortionate race of picture-dealers, and lain on his back all day on a flock-bed, waiting for patronage. He did nothing at all of the kind. Although not three-and-twenty years of age, he never smoked, and did not even wear a moustache; nor, although his hair was of an auburn hue, and abundant in quantity, did he part it down the middle, torture it into ringlets, or allow it to flow over the collar of his coat behind. He avowed, with much simplicity, that he was the son of a butcher at Norwich, that he had been bred at a charity-school, and, disliking the paternal calling, was on the eve of being apprenticed to a shoemaker, when he thought that he would come to London and see if he could earn a crust by the exercise of that taste for drawing which he had shown, chiefly in chalk and slate-pencil, from the very earliest days that he had worn a muffin-cap and leathers. At St. Wackleburga's charityschool he had learned to read and write imperfectly; all the rest he had taught himself. He was fortunate enough to arrive in the great town, a raw lad, in 1845, when there was a great railway mania. More iron roads were projected than there were towns and villages, almost, for them to connect with one another. Certain standing orders of Parliament had to be complied with, and certain maps and plans to be deposited at the offices of the Board of Trade, by midnight at a given date. These maps and plans were lithographed; and lithographic draughtsmen-nay, any ticket-writer who could make a mark on stone or tracing-paper-were at a premium. John Clere went in with the rest to a great lithographer in the City about a fortnight before the great day. He had been dropping prospectuses down areas at a penny a-piece-every body, the lame, the halt, and the blind, found employment

in connection with railways in the famous "forty five:" beggars were directors, and alms-men members, of provisional committees-when a youthful acquaintance, engaged in the same pursuit, told him of the great run on lithographic draughtsmen. He remembered that he had once made a chalk drawing or two on stone of a popular churchwarden, and a new pump for a printer in Norwich, who had paid the clever charity boy a few shillings for his pains. He went with specimens of his proficiency, and a neatly-written character from the master of St. Wackleburga; who, good pedagogue, always predicted that John Clere would become either president of the Royal Academy, or coach-painter in ordinary to her Majesty. The great lithographer cared nothing at all about his character, and very little about his specimens. He wanted hands. He gave every body a chance who said that he understood map-drawing. If the neophyte made blots, and showed manifest incapability, he was forthwith turned out. If he was up to his work, he was paid five shillings an hour for it, and might go on drawing maps and plans all day and all night. John Clere had a lithographic pen put in his hand, a stone before him, and a map to copy from. He proved neat and expeditious; and before a week was out his hire was raised to ten-to fifteen shillings an hour, to say nothing of refreshments laid on gratis and supplied at discretion. He made junctions between Stoke Pogis and Walton-on-the-Naze, with a branch to Stony Stratford, calling at Ashton-under-Lyne. He drew sections of the great Saddleback tunnel, and the great Lough Swilly bridge, and the great Ben Nevis viaduct. Ah, if those halcyon days could have lasted for ever! They did not. The fixed day for delivery arrived. Cabs tore up to the Board of Trade, disgorging frantic engineers and foaming agents laden with bolsters, with bales, with pillows of maps and plans. I suppose that not one-hundredth of those projected railways were ever completed, ever commenced indeed. However, John Clere found himself the better for fifty pounds in hard cash when that memorable midnight-hour struck. He had secured, too, a friend in the lithographer, who saw his talent and admired his wondrous perseverance; but alas, while the lithographer had paid his workmen. on the nail, the projecting companies neglected to pay the lithographer. The Stoke Pogis and Walton-on-the-Naze people, the Lough Swillyites and the Saddlebackians, owed him hundreds. He went bankrupt, and to the colony of Natal, whence he wrote now and then to John Clere, advising him to save up money enough to emigrate to that flourishing settlement.

John Clere had no luck for six years afterwards. He lived for a very long time on the fifty pounds the railway mania had brought him, and then sank down into a day-to-day fight for bread-and-cheese. When he could earn enough to buy bread with, he spent it in a subscription to a night-school in Frith Street, Soho, where he could draw from the "round," or plaster casts from the antique; and hoped some day to be able to subscribe to another school, where he could draw from the living model. He

felt that he had every thing to learn, and so went on learning, and found his account in it. I wish that Mr. Samuel Smiles could have known John Clere. He would have added another chapter then to his good book on Self Help.

John Clere could not paint much. He dreaded the idleness of companionship, and the temptations to mooning and day-dreaming of a studio. The steward was kind to him, and there being an unoccupied cabin at the top of the house with, fortunately, a window in it,-for the majority of the chambers only enjoyed a dim illumination from a common studio, -allowed him to go up there and try his hand at painting, which he did now and then, in a rough-and-ready fashion, with a board propped against a locker for an easel. He had a taste for mediæval art too, and was dextrous at missal painting; but those were long before the days of illuminating Art Union, and the missals would not bring in bread. He had a mingled scorn and loathing for the picture-dealers, and so did not devote himself to the production of the hasty oil sketches known as "potboilers," or the money-bringing daubs that turn up in cheap auctions. He cultivated a few of the rougher species of design, and lived by it, preferring mostly to work in the common reading-room below, where the poor old Dictionary-maker used sometimes to watch his labours in meek admiration; and Clidger used to scowl at him because he had no grievances, and Tottlepot rail at him because he did not cultivate High Art, and had no sense of the Beautiful. He would have conciliated Tottlepot by listening to any amount of his poetry, which rather amused him than otherwise, but for a falling off of which you are speedily to hear. So he worked and worked, and sufficient for the day was the Humble Pie thereof. He drew cheap valentines; he touched up portraits for cheap miniatures (great is photography in the land now, but it was only a weak and suckling art then); he drew cartoons on wood of landaus, and electro-plate, and artificial limbs, and gentlemen measuring themselves with a view to being provided by cheap tailors at their provincial residences with exquisitely fitting habiliments, the destination of most of which cartoons was the advertising columns of newspapers. And now and then he had a romance to illustrate for a cheap publisher, or a portrait to draw on stone, and was quite happy on about fifteen shillings a week, reserving any overplus for the development of a certain purpose, of which only his strong human will and the Power who had given it to him knew the purport.

Pendragon had not been many days in the chambers before he struck up something like a friendship with this simple, quiet, earnest young man. But for his dread of eating that Humble Pie, of which the other partook every day quite contentedly, and even thankfully, he would have asked him to recommend him to any employment he knew of; but he refrained; and John Clere, who had a habit of minding his own business, naturally thought that the parson had some private means, or that he

would not sit all day long reading books and biting his nails. Pendragon found out, little by little, that Clere took an interest in Church matters, and that he used to go to early service every morning to a certain celebrated and much-decorated church in Wells Street, Oxford Street, and on Sundays to a fane even more highly decorated at Knightsbridge. He began to hesitate whether it were not incumbent upon him-who had sacrificed so much for conscience' sake-who had given up his curacy at Swordsley because he differed from the rector as to red crosses, and surplices, and brass work, and artificial flowers, and candlesticks-to hate this poor toiling young artist because he was a Puseyite, and confessed that he read Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints. But was he a Puseyite? Somehow Ruthyn had to own to himself that John Clere did not talk as the Reverend Ernest Goldthorpe talked; that he shared much more knowledge and much more liberality than the aristocratic rector, that he seemed to have made a deep and earnest study of things which Ernest Goldthorpe-so his ex-curate thought-had only adopted as a fashion and a whim. "This Puseyism, or whatever it is," said Pendragon, "has made yonder magnifico at Swordsley supercilious; it has made Magdalen Hill proud and disdainful; but it seems to have instilled into this young man only a profound humility, and a desire to go on learning good things." It was easy to see that John Clere was no bigot. If he leant even Romewards, and on this Pendragon pressed him hard, but unavailingly, it was with no supine reliance. If he turned away from cant, and howling Boanergism, and the puly shabby piety which prompts some people, with no fear of the Mendicity Society before their eyes, to De perpetually scrawling begging-letters to Heaven: not honest prayers, but selfish petitions based on good deeds they affect to have done but never have, it was without intolerance and without severity. John Clere belonged to a little knot of theologians who lived quietly and contentedly at the chambers, and who, when Pendragon had been admitted to their intimacy, and had made up his mind not to hate the artist for his Puseyism, he discovered could agree excellently well among themselves. There was one of the hardest of Scotchmen, who had something to do with a Manchester warehouse, and who held by Crown-Court prophecy and Doctor Cumming. There was a mild old man in a large black stock and a larger black wig, and who, in-doors and out of doors, wore a blue cloak with a fur collar; who sat under a famous preacher, then wont to hold forth at a chapel in Oxendon Street, Haymarket. He was slightly afraid, the mild old gentleman in the stock and wig used to remark, that the Doctor had Socinian tendencies; but he could not help admiring his eloquence, and revering his truly practical piety. There was a Unitarian, who attended a place of worship where Gray's Elegy or Campbell's Lust Man were occasionally sung by way of hymns, and whom Pendragon at first regarded with the kind of feeling with which Torquemada might have regarded a relapsed heretic, but who was nevertheless a very quiet, honest, God-fearing man, of grave conversation and blameless life. There was a

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