Poverty has nearly always been the patrimony of the Muses. "An author who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination," says Whipple, "is constantly coquetting with starvation." A glance at the brief life of Chatterton is evidence enough of the truth of this remark. He began to write poems of extraordinary merit at an immature age, and when a mere boy came up to London to seek for literary employment as a means of support. He wrote sermons, poems, essays, and political articles with an ability far beyond his years. He was indeed a prodigy of genius, and probably would have stood in the front rank of English poets had he lived to maturer years. No one ever equalled him at the same age, and Tasso alone, says Campbell, can be compared to him as a youthful prodigy. His life in the metropolis was one of great hardship and deprivation, as he often suffered for want of the simplest necessities of life, and grew so emaciated in appearance from the lack of food that strangers, sometimes meeting him in the street, forced him to accept a dinner which he was too proud to ask for. All this while, with much more consideration for the feelings of the family at home than thought for himself, he wrote cheerful letters to his mother, and even sent small and acceptable presents to his sister, in order to content them for his absence. Seeking only expression for the divine afflatus within him, he had no thought of self, no care for the morrow. By degrees, young as he was, he sank into utter despondency, and was reduced to actual starvation. He was found at last upon his bed of straw, having taken his own life in a fit of desperation. At the time he swallowed the fatal poison he was not quite nineteen years of age. George Combe, the English author, encountered a full share of the vicissitudes of genius. He was capable of much theoretical goodness, but was not practical in that respect. He wrote in his old age, "Few men have enjoyed more of the pleasures and brilliance of life than myself;" yet he died in the King's Bench, where he had taken refuge from his creditors, not leaving enough to pay the expenses of his funeral. Many a child of genius has been compelled to prostitute godlike powers to repel the gnawings of hunger; as for instance Holzman, the sagacious Oriental scholar and professor of Greek, who sold his notes on Dion Cassius for a dinner. The record of this learned man's struggles with dire want form a pathetic chapter in literary history. He tells us himself that at the age of eighteen he studied to acquire glory, but at twenty-five he studied to get bread.