felicities! what laurels!  And now we have recently learned, that the daughter of Madame DE SEVIGNE lived on ill terms with her mother, of whose enchanting genius she appears to have been insensible!  The unquestionable documents are two letters hitherto cautiously secreted.  The daughter was in the house of her mother when an extraordinary letter was addressed to her from the chamber of Madame de Sevigne after a sleepless night.  In this she describes, with her peculiar felicity, the ill-treatment she received from the daughter she idolised; it is a kindling effusion of maternal reproach, and tenderness, and genius.[A]

[Footnote A:  Lettres inedites de Madame de Sevigne, pp. 201 and 203.]

Some have been deemed disagreeable companions, because they felt the weariness of dulness, or the impertinence of intrusion; described as bad husbands, when united to women who, without a kindred feeling, had the mean art to prey upon their infirmities; or as bad fathers, because their offspring have not always reflected the moral beauty of their own page.  But the magnet loses nothing of its virtue, even when the particles about it, incapable themselves of being attracted, are not acted on by its occult property.

CHAPTER XVII.

The poverty of literary men.—­Poverty, a relative quality.—­Of the poverty of literary men in what degree desirable.—­Extreme poverty.—­Task-work.  —­Of gratuitous works.—­A project to provide against the worst state of poverty among literary men.

Poverty is a state not so fatal to genius, as it is usually conceived to be.  We shall find that it has been sometimes voluntarily chosen; and that to connect too closely great fortune with great genius, creates one of those powerful but unhappy alliances, where the one party must necessarily act contrary to the interests of the other.

Poverty is a relative quality, like cold and heat, which are but the increase or the diminution in our own sensations.  The positive idea must arise from comparison.  There is a state of poverty reserved even for the wealthy man, the instant that he comes in hateful contact with the enormous capitalist.  But there is a poverty neither vulgar nor terrifying, asking no favours and on no terms receiving any; a poverty which annihilates its ideal evils, and, becoming even a source of pride, will confer independence, that first step to genius.

Among the continental nations, to accumulate wealth in the spirit of a capitalist does not seem to form the prime object of domestic life.  The traffic of money is with them left to the traffickers, their merchants, and their financiers.  In our country, the commercial character has so closely interwoven and identified itself with the national one, and its peculiar views have so terminated all our pursuits, that every rank is alike influenced by its spirit, and things are valued by a market-price which naturally