Doubtless, that would have been more meritorious for the time. But when I had got the sixty or the hundred pounds--what should I have done with them? The question only becomes doubly and trebly serious; and all the more, to me, because when I told you last January that I had bought a picture for a thousand pounds, permitting myself in that folly for your advantage, as I thought, hearing that many of you wanted art Patronage, and wished to live by painting,--one of your own popular organs, the Liverpool Daily Courier, of February 9th, said, "it showed want of taste,--of tact," and was "something like a mockery," to tell you so! I am not to buy pictures, therefore, it seems;--you like to be kept in mines and tunnels, and occasionally blown hither and thither, or crushed flat, rather than live by painting, in good light, and with the chance of remaining all day in a whole and unextended skin? But what shall I buy, then, with the next thirty pieces of gold I can scrape together? Precious things have been bought, indeed, and sold, before now for thirty pieces, even of silver, but with doubtful issue. The over-charitable person who was bought to be killed at that price, indeed, advised the giving of alms; but you won't have alms, I suppose, you are so independent, nor go into almshouses--(and, truly, I did not much wonder, as I walked by the old church of Abingdon, a Sunday or two since, where the almshouses are set round the churchyard, and under the level of it, and with a cheerful view of it, except that the tombstones slightly block the light of the lattice-windows; with beautiful texts from Scripture over the doors, to remind the paupers still more emphatically that, highly blessed as they were, they were yet mortal)--you won't go into almshouses; and all the clergy in London have been shrieking against almsgiving to the lower poor this whole winter long, till I am obliged, whenever I want to give anybody a penny, to look up and down the street first, to see if a clergyman's coming. Of course, I know I might buy as many iron railings as I please, and be praised; but I've no room for them. I can't well burn more coals than I do, because of the blacks, which spoil my books; and the Americans won't let me buy any blacks alive, or else I would have some black dwarfs with parrots, such as one sees in the pictures of Paul Veronese. I should, of course, like myself, above all things, to buy a pretty white girl, with a title--and I could get great praise for doing that--only I haven't money enough. White girls come dear, even when one buys them only like coals, for fuel. The Duke of Bedford, indeed, bought Joan of Arc from the French, to burn, for only ten thousand pounds, and a pension of three hundred a year to the Bastard of Vendôme--and I could and would have given that for her, and not burnt her; but one hasn't such a chance every day. Will you, any of you, have the goodness--beggars, clergymen, workmen, seraphic doctors, Mr. Mill, Mr.