How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve;[4]
And every day in ease and peace to dine,
And rest in comfort!—what a heart is mine!”
Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as (mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. “Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you—when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. ‘The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,’ sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be—whether thou dost not pray prayers of long omission—whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!” As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,
“Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield
When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows;
You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood,
And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind.”
Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day—which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. “That day,” he often told a friend, in after life, “I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful.” As the sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe’s tragedies: “We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling.” And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.