The world, but for them, had been chaos and night,
A desert of thorns, not a garden of flowers!
* Plautus turned a mill; Terenee was a slave; Boethius died
in a jail; Tasso was often distressed for a shilling; Benti-
voglio was refused admission into an hospital he had himself
founded; Cervantes died (almost) of hunger; Camoens ended
his days in an almshouse; Vaugelas sold his body to the
surgeons to support life; Burns died penniless,
disappointed, and heart-broken; and Massinger, Lee, and
Otway, were “steeped in poverty to the very lips.” Yet how
consoling are John Taylor the Water Poet's lines! Addressing
his friend, Wm. Fennor, he exclaims,
“Thou say'st that poetry descended is From poverty: thou
tak'st thy mark amiss—
In spite of weal or woe, or want of pelf,
It is a kingdom of content itself,!”
To the above unhappy list may be added Thomas Dekker the
Dramatist. “Lent unto the Company the 'of February, 1598, to
discharge Mr. Dicker out of the Counter in the Poultry, the
some of Fortie Shillinges.” In another place Mr. Henslowe
redeems Dekker out of the Clinke.
This was a subject that awakened all Uncle Timothy's enthusiasm!
“Age could not wither it, nor custom stale
Its infinite variety.”
But it produced fits of abstraction and melancholy; and Mr. Bosky knowing this, would interpose a merry tale or song. Upon the present occasion he made a bold dash from the sublime to the ridiculous, and striking up a comical voluntary, played us out of Little Britain.—
When I behold the setting sun,
And shop is shut, and work is done,
I strike my flag, and mount my tile,