No More Learning

TO MR. PETER HILL.

[The poet's eloquent apostrophe to poverty has no little feeling in
it: he beheld the money which his poems brought melt silently away,
and he looked to the future with more fear than hope. ]

_Ellisland, 17th January, 1791. _

Take these two guineas, and place them over against that d--mned
account of yours! which has gagged my mouth these five or six months!
I can as little write good things as apologies to the man I owe money
to. O the supreme curse of making three guineas do the business of
five! Not all the labours of Hercules; not all the Hebrews' three
centuries of Egyptian bondage, were such an insuperable business, such
an infernal task! ! Poverty! thou half-sister of death, thou
cousin-german of hell: where shall I find force of execration equal to
the amplitude of thy demerits? Oppressed by thee, the venerable
ancient, grown hoary in the practice of every virtue, laden with years
and wretchedness, implores a little--little aid to support his
existence, from a stony-hearted son of Mammon, whose sun of prosperity
never knew a cloud; and is by him denied and insulted. Oppressed by
thee, the man of sentiment, whose heart glows with independence, and
melts with sensibility, inly pines under the neglect, or writhes in
bitterness of soul, under the contumely of arrogant, unfeeling wealth.
Oppressed by thee, the son of genius, whose ill-starred ambition
plants him at the tables of the fashionable and polite, must see in
suffering silence, his remark neglected, and his person despised,
while shallow greatness in his idiot attempts at wit, shall meet with
countenance and applause.
Nor is it only the family of worth that have
reason to complain of thee: the children of folly and vice, though in
common with thee the offspring of evil, smart equally under thy rod.
Owing to thee, the man of unfortunate disposition and neglected
education, is condemned as a fool for his dissipation, despised and
shunned as a needy wretch, when his follies as usual bring him to
want; and when his unprincipled necessities drive him to dishonest
practices, he is abhorred as a miscreant, and perishes by the justice
of his country. But far otherwise is the lot of the man of family and
fortune. _His_ early follies and extravagance, are spirit and fire;
_his_ consequent wants are the embarrassments of an honest fellow; and
when, to remedy the matter, he has gained a legal commission to
plunder distant provinces, or massacre peaceful nations, he returns,
perhaps, laden with the spoils of rapine and murder; lives wicked and
respected, and dies a scoundrel and a lord. --Nay, worst of all, alas
for helpless woman! the needy prostitute, who has shivered at the
corner of the street, waiting to earn the wages of casual
prostitution, is left neglected and insulted, ridden down by the
chariot wheels of the coroneted RIP, hurrying on to the
guilty assignation; she who without the same necessities to plead,
riots nightly in the same guilty trade.

Well! divines may say of it what they please; but execration is to the
mind what phlebotomy is to the body: the vital sluices of both are
wonderfully relieved by their respective evacuations.

R. B.

* * * * *




CCV.


TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

[To Alexander Cunningham the poet generally communicated his favourite
compositions. ]

_Ellisland, 23d January, 1791. _

Many happy returns of the season to you, my dear friend!