Nevertheless, something must be done: one cannot live upon gentility, even though certificated at Oxford. Old Spimkins was precisely of this way of thinking; so, as a next resource, proposed articling his son to an attorney. But here again a difficulty presented itself. The business of a solicitor requires, it is well known, the impudence of a Yorkshire postboy, whereas Thomas was diffidence itself. Law, then, was out of the question; the church presented equal impediments; the navy, though respectable, was inappropriate; the army ruinously expensive. In this exigence, nothing remained but literature; to which, after many an urgent, impassioned, but fruitless remonstrance from his father, the young man finally resolved to addict himself. Meanwhile, his kind patrons, the Spinkses, thinking, naturally enough, that genius should vegetate among congenial scenery, took him on a visit to their villa at Newington Butts, where, in a romantic summer-house, built up of red bricks and oyster-shells, he gave vent to some of the sweetest stanzas imaginable. One of these, inspired by that poetic ceremony, the Lord Mayor’s Show, fell accidentally into the hands of his lordship himself, who pronounced the author to be “a clever fellow, and one as knew what’s what.” This opinion, delivered in public by so great a judge, soon made the round of Crutched-Friars; so that, whenever Thomas chanced to make his appearance in public, the very shop-boys would whisper admiringly after him, “I say, Jack, there goes a poet!” Behold, then, our sensitive minstrel, the pride of his neighbourhood, the “young Astyanax” of his family! As such, it became him to affect eccentricity. Accordingly, he grew “melancholy and gentleman-like,” eschewed his cravat, and even advised his father to addict himself to Scott and Byron. But the old gentleman winced exceedingly at this proposal. Recollections of a poetic apprentice he once had, who had for some months carried on a very irregular flirtation with the till, came thronging fast upon his mind, and spurred him at once to a refusal. But what can resist the eternal solicitations of the shrewder sex? By day his daughter, by night his wife, kept teazing him into gradual compliance with their wishes. First he was prevailed on to dine at five, instead of two o’clock; secondly, to listen to his daughter’s execution of “Oh! ‘tis love, ‘tis love!” sung with a twist of the mouth peculiarly provocative of that passion; and lastly (the severest cut of all), to give _conversaziones_ to his son’s literary acquaintances.