One evening we were surprised by an unexpected visitor; it was the lawyer, my employer. ‘Desmond!’ said he, ‘I am a ruined man. For having been too scrupulous to make beggars of others, I have a fair prospect of becoming one myself. You are shocked and astonished. Do not grieve on my account. I have neither wife nor children. Very trivial and very remediable is the evil that can happen to me. “The valiant by himself, what can he suffer?” You will think a lawyer has as little business with poetry as he has with justice. Perhaps so. I have been too partial to both.’ I was glad to see him so cheerful, and expressed a hope that his affairs would take a better turn than he seemed to expect. ‘You shall know more,’ said he, ‘in a few days; in the meantime, here are the arrears I owe you.’ When he came again, he said: ‘My creditors are neither numerous nor cruel. I have made over to them all my property, but they allow me to retain possession of a small house in Westmoreland, with an annuity for my life, sufficient to maintain me in competence. I could propose a wild scheme to you if I thought you would not be offended.’ ‘That,’ said I, ‘I certainly will not, propose what you may.’ ‘Tell me,’ said he, ‘which do you think the most useful and uncontaminating implement, the quill or the spade?’ ‘The spade,’ said I, ‘generally speaking, unquestionably: the quill in some most rare and solitary instances.’ ‘In the hand of Homer and Plutarch, of Seneca and Tacitus, of Shakespeare and Rousseau? I am not speaking of them, or of those who, however humbly, reflect their excellencies. But in the hands of the slaves of commerce, the minions of law, the venal advocates of superstition, the sycophants of corruption, the turnspits of literature, the paragraph-mongers of prostituted journals, the hireling compounders of party-praise and censure, under the name of periodical criticism, what say you to it?’ ‘What can I say,’ said I, ‘but that it is the curse of society, and the bane of the human mind?’ ‘And yet,’ said he, ‘in some of these ways must you employ it, if you wish to live by it. Literature is not the soil in which truth and liberty can flourish, unless their cultivators be independent of the world. Those who are not so, whatever be the promise of their beginning, will end either in sycophants or beggars. As mere mechanical instruments, in pursuits unconnected with literature, what say you to the comparison?’ ‘What Cincinnatus would have said,’ I answered.