cannot afford to give it, the consciousness that her neighbour's family
(the head of which perhaps is a most successful financier and
market-rigger) are going to the Isle of Wight for three months, though
there is nothing at all the matter with them, is an added bitterness.
How often it is said (no doubt with some well-intentioned idea of
consolation) that after all money cannot buy life! I remember a curious
instance to the contrary of this. In the old days of sailing-packets a
country gentleman embarked for Ireland, and when a few miles from land
broke a bloodvessel through seasickness. A doctor on board pronounced
that he would certainly die before the completion of the voyage if it
was continued; whereupon the sick man's friends consulted with the
captain, who convoked the passengers, and persuaded them to accept
compensation in proportion to their needs for allowing the vessel to be
put back; which was accordingly done.

One of the most popular fictions of our time was even written with this
very moral, that life is unpurchasable. Yet nothing is more certain than
that life is often lost through want of money--that is, of the obvious
means to save it. In such a case how truly has it been written that 'the
destruction of the poor is their poverty'! This, however, is scarcely a
pinch, but, to those who have hearts to feel it, a wrench that 'divides
asunder the joints and the marrow.'

A nobler example, because a less personal one, of the pinch of poverty,
is when it prevents the accomplishment of some cherished scheme for the
benefit of the human race. I have felt such a one myself when in extreme
youth I was unable, from a miserable absence of means, to publish a
certain poem in several cantos. That the world may not have been much
better for it if I had had the means does not affect the question. It is
easy to be incredulous. Henry VII. of England did not believe in the