A POET IN THE CITY


'In the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.'

I (and when I say I, I must be understood to be speaking dramatically)
only venture into the City once a year, for the very pleasant purpose of
drawing that twelve-pound-ten by which the English nation, ever so
generously sensitive to the necessities, not to say luxuries, of the
artist, endeavours to express its pride and delight in me. It would be a
very graceful exercise of gratitude for me here to stop and parenthesise
the reader on the subject of all that twelve-pound-ten has been to me,
how it has quite changed the course of my life, given me that
long-desired opportunity of doing my best work in peace, for which so
often I vainly sighed in Fleet Street, and even allowed me an indulgence
in minor luxuries which I could not have dreamed of enjoying before the
days of that twelve-pound-ten. Now not only peace and plenty, but
leisure and luxury are mine. There is nothing goes so far as--Government
money.

Usually on these literally State occasions, I drive up in state, that is
in a hansom. There is only one other day in the year on which I am so
splendid, but that is another beautiful story. It, too, is a day and an
hour too joyous to be approached otherwise than on winged wheels, too
stately to be approached in merely pedestrian fashion. To go on foot to
draw one's pension seems a sort of slight on the great nation that does
one honour, as though a Lord Mayor should make his appearance in the