The villanous _Beehive_! Bread was worked out of it, certainly; but fame,
but hope for the future--certainly not. Milton's _Paradise Lost_ would have
perished without a sound, had it appeared in the _Beehive_.
Fine things were there in a fragmentary crude state, composed by Burley
himself. At the end of a week they were dead and forgotten--never read by
one man of education and taste; taken simultaneously and indifferently with
shallow politics and wretched essays, yet selling, perhaps, twenty or
thirty thousand copies--an immense sale; and nothing got out of them but
bread and brandy!
"What more would you have?" cried John Burley. "Did not stern old Sam
Johnson say he could never write but from want?"
"He might say it," answered Leonard; "but he never meant posterity to
believe him. And he would have died of want, I suspect, rather than have
written _Rasselas_ for the _Beehive_! Want is a grand thing," continued the
boy, thoughtfully. "A parent of grand things. Necessity is strong, and
should give us its own strength; but Want should shatter asunder, with its
very writhings, the walls of our prison-house, and not sit contented with
the allowance the jail gives us in exchange for our work."
"There is no prison-house to a man who calls upon Bacchus--stay--I will
translate to you Schiller's Dithyramb. 'Then see I Bacchus--then up come
Cupid and Phoebus, and all the Celestials are filling my dwelling.'"
Breaking into impromptu careless rhymes, Burley threw off a rude but
spirited translation of that divine lyric.
"O materialist!" cried the boy, with his bright eyes suffused. "Schiller
calls on the gods to take him to their heaven with him; and ye would debase
the Gods to a gin palace."
"Ho, ho!" cried Burley with his giant laugh. "Drink, and you will
understand the Dithyramb."