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 Phcebus, 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 them; and you would debase the gods to a ginpalace.”
“Ho, ho!” cried Burley, with his giant laugh. “Drink, and you will understand the Dithyramb.”
