the craven mass of us are keeping up our starveling pretence that it is
more important to be good than to be rich, and piously cheating,
robbing, and murdering one another by doing our duty as policemen,
soldiers, bailiffs, jurymen, turnkeys, hangmen, tradesmen, and curates,
at the command of those who know that the golden grapes are _not_ sour.
Why, good heavens! we shall all pretend that this straightforward truth
of mine is mere Swiftian satire, because it would require a little
courage to take it seriously and either act on it or make me drink the
hemlock for uttering it.

There was the less excuse for my blindness because I was at that very
moment laying the foundations of my high fortune by the most ruthless
disregard of all the quack duties which lead the peasant lad of fiction
to the White House, and harness the real peasant boy to the plough until
he is finally swept, as rubbish, into the workhouse. I was an ablebodied
and ableminded young man in the strength of my youth; and my family,
then heavily embarrassed, needed my help urgently. That I should have
chosen to be a burden to them instead was, according to all the
conventions of peasant lad fiction, monstrous. Well, without a blush I
embraced the monstrosity. I did not throw myself into the struggle for
life: I threw my mother into it. I was not a staff to my father's old
age: I hung on to his coat tails. His reward was to live just long
enough to read a review of one of these silly novels written in an
obscure journal by a personal friend of my own (now eminent in
literature as Mr. John Mackinnon Robertson) prefiguring me to some
extent as a considerable author. I think, myself, that this was a
handsome reward, far better worth having than a nice pension from a
dutiful son struggling slavishly for his parent's bread in some sordid
trade. Handsome or not, it was the only return he ever had for the
little pension he contrived to export from Ireland for his family. My