Читать книгу By-ways in Book-land: Short Essays on Literary Subjects - Adams William Henry Davenport - Страница 7

Few frailties of mankind have been more bitterly scouted than that of meanness in money matters. Of the two, prodigality has been thought the better. The man who is poor has not been censured for being careful; rather has he been praised for not being ashamed to own his poverty. But the spectacle of the rich man hoarding his wealth and not living according to his means has always excited the displeasure of mankind – not only, perhaps, because money kept in store seems for the time useless, but because if expended it would be very acceptable to its recipients. The world has commended the man who gives out of his superfluity, but it has condemned him who keeps too much to himself. All literature, from the earliest times, is full of denunciation of such a character. The miserly and the stingy have been impaled over and over again on the sword of the satirist.

Meanness has not been confined to the obscure; it has had some distinguished votaries – as, for example, his Gracious Majesty King James I., whose economical propensities were notorious. Of him it was admirably written that

Take, again, the great Duke of Marlborough, whose two chief qualities of mind were very happily hit off in the couplet ‘On a High Bridge over a Small Stream at Blenheim’:

Garrick was accused of money-grubbing, and his weakness in that respect was the subject of more than one smart jest by Foote. When somebody, àpropos of a remark made by Garrick on the parsimony of others, asked, ‘Why on earth doesn’t Garrick take the beam out of his own eye before attacking the mote in other people’s?’ – Foote replied, ‘He is not sure of selling the timber.’ And again, when Garrick, after dropping a guinea and failing to find it, said it had ‘gone to the devil, he thought,’ Foote remarked, ‘Well, David, let you alone for making a guinea go farther than anybody else’ – a repartee which was perhaps in the mind of Shirley Brooks when, referring to the excellence of Scotch shooting at long distances, he wrote:

Then there was Lord Eldon, whose nearness was proverbial, and whose unwillingness to spend displayed itself markedly in his commissariat department. An anonymous epigram professed to record an ‘Inquest Extraordinary’:

We are also told that, when Eldon and Sir Arthur Pigott quarrelled over the proper pronunciation of the legal term ‘lien’ – the former calling it ‘lion,’ and the latter ‘lean’ – Jekyll produced the following:

Of Lord Kenyon, another judge of like inhospitable tendencies, someone said that in his house it was always Lent in the kitchen and Passion Week in the parlour. On another occasion it was remarked that ‘in his lordship’s kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;’ to which Jekyll, pretending to be angry, replied, ‘Spits! in the name of common-sense, don’t talk about his spits – for nothing turns on them!’ When his lordship died, the words ‘Mors Janua Vita