It is hard to conceive a situation more replete with wretchedness than that of the struggling man of letters--of him who has offered his _all_ before the shrine of long-looked-for fame; who has staked health, and peace, and happiness, that he may win her favour, and who nevertheless holds an uncertain tenure even of his “daily bread.” He is poor and in misery, yet he lives in a world of boundless wealth; but in this very thing is to be found the exquisite agony of his condition. What though haggard want wave around him her lean and famished hands, what avails _that_? Write he must, if it be but to satisfy the cravings of a stinted nature; write he must, though his only reward be the scanty pittance that was greedily covenanted for, and when his due, but grudgingly presented him. And then he must delineate plenty and happiness; he must describe “the short holiday of childhood,” the guileless period of maiden’s modesty, the sunshine of the moment when we first hear that we are loved, the placid calm of peaceful resignation; or it may be, the charms that nature wears in England’s happy vales, the beauty of her scenery, the splendour and wealth of her institutions, the protecting law for the poor man, her admirable code of jurisprudence. All, all these may be the theme of his song, or the subject of his appointed task; but the hours will pass away, and the spirits he has called up will disappear, and his visions of happiness will leave him only, if it be possible, more fearfully alive to his own helplessness--they cannot wake their echo in his soul, and instead of their worthier office of healing and blessedness, they render his wound deeper, deadlier, and more rankling. And who is there, think you, kind reader, that can feel more acutely the sting of neglect and poverty than the lonely man of genius? Of him how truly may it be said, “he cannot dig, to beg he is ashamed!” His intellect is his world; it is the glorious city in which he abides, the treasure-house wherein his very being is garnered; it is to cultivate it that he has lived; and when _it_ fails him in his wintry hour, is not he indeed “of all men most miserable?”