[Footnote 1: "You offer 1,500 guineas for the new Canto [the fourth of 'Childe Harold']: I won't take it. I ask two thousand five hundred guineas for it, which you will either give or not as you think proper.... If Mr. Eustace was to have two thousand for a poem on Education; if Mr. Moore is to have three thousand for Lalla; if Mr. Campbell is to have three thousand for his prose or poetry.--I don't mean to disparage these gentlemen or their labours.--but I ask the aforesaid price for mine."--_Lord Byron to Mr. Murray_, Sept. 4th, 1817.] There is the greatest difference in the manner in which men bear the burden of debt. Some feel it to be no burden at all; others bear it very lightly; whilst others look upon creditors in the light of persecutors, and themselves in the light of martyrs. But where the moral sense is a little more keen,--where men use the goods of others, without rendering the due equivalent of money--where they wear unpaid clothes, eat unpaid meat, drink unpaid wines, and entertain guests at the expense of the butcher, grocer, wine-merchant, and greengrocer,--they must necessarily feel that their conduct is of the essence, not only of shabbiness, but of dishonesty, and the burden must then bear very heavily indeed. Of light-hearted debtors, the proportion is considerable. Thus Theophilus Cibber, when drowned in debt, begged the loan of a guinea, and spent it on a dish of ortolans. Thus Foote when his mother wrote to him--"Dear Sam, I am in prison for debt--come and help your loving mother,"--replied, "Dear Mother, so am I, which prevents his duty being paid to his loving mother by her affectionate son." Steele and Sheridan both bore the load lightly. When entertaining company, they put the bailiffs who were in possession in livery, and made them wait at table, passing them off as servants. Nothing disturbed Steele's equanimity; and when driven from London by debt, he carried his generosity into the country, giving prizes to the lads and lasses assembled at rural games and country dances. Sheridan also made very light of his debts, and had many a good joke over them. Some one asked him how it was that the O' was not prefixed to his name, when he replied that he was sure no family had a better right to it, "for in truth, we _owe_ everybody." And when a creditor once apologized for the soiled and tattered state of a bill, which had been much worn by being so often presented, Sheridan advised him "as a friend, to take it home and write it _upon parchment_." Very different was it in the case of poor Burns, who was almost driven distracted because he owed a debt of £7 4_s_. for a volunteer's uniform, which he could not pay. He sent to his friend Thomson, the publisher of his songs, imploring the loan of £5, promising full value in "song-genius."[1] His last poem was a "love song," in part payment of the loan, which he composed only a few days before his death.