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 Phœbus, 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 you would debase the gods to a gin palace."
"Ho, ho!" cried Burley, with his giant laugh. "Drink, and you will
understand the Dithyramb."