and the extravagant; expensive indulgences had been made necessary to him by habit; and, when in the year 1798, or thereabouts, he had to choose between a bit of bacon, a scrag of mutton, and a lodging at ten shillings a week, on the one side, and made-dishes, wine, a fine house and a footman on the other side, he chose the latter.  He became the servile Editor of CANNING’S Anti-jacobin newspaper; and he, who had more wit and learning than all the rest of the writers put together, became the miserable tool in circulating their attacks upon everything that was hostile to a system which he deplored and detested.  But he secured the made-dishes, the wine, the footman and the coachman.  A sinecure as ’clerk of the Foreign Estreats,’ gave him 329_l._ a year, a double commissionership of the lottery gave him 600_l._ or 700_l._ more; and, at a later period, his Editorship of the Quarterly Review gave him perhaps as much more.  He rolled in his carriage for several years; he fared sumptuously; he was buried at Westminster Abbey, of which his friend and formerly his brother pamphleteer in defence of PITT was the Dean; and never is he to be heard of more!  Mr. GIFFORD would have been full as happy; his health would have been better, his life longer, and his name would have lived for ages, if he could have turned to the bit of bacon and scrag of mutton in 1798; for his learning and talents were such, his reasonings so clear and conclusive, and his wit so pointed and keen, that his writings must have been generally read, must have been of long duration! and, indeed, must have enabled him (he being always a single man) to live in his latter days in as good style as that which he procured by becoming a sinecurist, a pensioner and a hack, all which he was from the moment he lent himself to the Quarterly Review.  Think of the mortification of such a man, when he was called upon to justify the power-of-imprisonment bill in 1817!  But to go into particulars would be tedious:  his life was a life of luxurious misery, than which a worse is not to be imagined.

57.  So that poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty, the shame of being thought poor, is a great and fatal weakness, though arising, in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.  When a good man, as in the phraseology of the city, means a rich man, we are not to wonder that every one wishes to be thought richer than he is.  When adulation is sure to follow wealth, and when contempt would be awarded to many if they were not wealthy, who are spoken of with deference, and even lauded to the skies, because their riches are great and notorious; when this is the case, we are not to be surprised that men are ashamed to be thought to be poor.  This is one of the greatest of all the dangers at the outset of life:  it has brought thousands and hundreds of thousands to ruin, even to pecuniary ruin.