“Why, here is provision enough for all the people,” said Henry; “why should they want? why do not they go and take some of these things?”
“They must not,” said the dean, “unless they were their own.”
“What, uncle! does no part of the earth, nor anything which the earth produces, belong to the poor?”
“Certainly not.”
“Why did not you say so, then, in your pamphlet?”
“Because it is what everybody knows.”
“Oh, then, what you have said in your pamphlet is only what—nobody knows.”
There appeared to the dean, in the delivery of this sentence, a satirical acrimony, which his irritability as an author could but ill forgive.
An author, it is said, has more acute feelings in respect to his works than any artist in the world besides.
Henry had some cause, on the present occasion, to think this observation just; for no sooner had he spoken the foregoing words, than his uncle took him by the hand out of the room, and, leading him to his study, there he enumerated his various faults; and having told him “it was for all those, too long permitted with impunity, and not merely for the present impertinence, that he meant to punish him,” ordered him to close confinement in his chamber for a week.