Der Praefekt

the poor of
    the town have a vested right, if they only knew how to get at it: is
    not that something the case here?”
     
    Bold couldn’t deny it, but thought it was one of those cases which
    required a good deal of management before any real good could be done.
    It was a pity that he had not considered this before he crept into the
    lion’s mouth, in the shape of an attorney’s office.
     
    “It will cost you a good deal, I fear,” said Towers.
     
    “A few hundreds,” said Bold—“perhaps three hundred; I can’t help
    that, and am prepared for it.”
     
    “That’s philosophical.  It’s quite refreshing to hear a man talking of
    his hundreds in so purely indifferent a manner.  But I’m sorry you are
    giving the matter up.  It injures a man to commence a thing of this
    kind, and not carry it through.  Have you seen that?” and he threw
    a small pamphlet across the table, which was all but damp from the
    drücken.
     
    Bold had not seen it nor heard of it; but he was well acquainted with
    the author of it,—a gentleman whose pamphlets, condemnatory of all
    things in these modern days, had been a good deal talked about of
    spät.
     
    Dr Pessimist Anticant was a Scotchman, who had passed a great portion
    of his early days in Germany; he had studied there with much effect,
    and had learnt to look with German subtilty into the root of things,
    and to examine for himself their intrinsic worth and worthlessness.
    No man ever resolved more bravely than he to accept as good nothing
    that was evil; to banish from him as evil nothing that was good.  ‘Tis
    a pity that he should not have recognised the fact, that in this world
    no good is unalloyed, and that there is but little evil that has not
    in it some seed of what is goodly.
     
    Returning from Germany, he had astonished the reading public by the
    vigour of his thoughts, put forth in the quaintest language. Er
    cannot write English, said the critics.  No matter, said the public;
    we can read what he does write, and that without yawning.  And so Dr
    Pessimist Anticant became popular.  Popularity spoilt him for all
    further real use, as it has done many another.  While, with some
    diffidence, he confined his objurgations to the occasional follies or
    shortcomings of mankind; while he ridiculed the energy of the squire
    devoted to the slaughter of partridges, or the mistake of some noble
    patron who turned a poet into a gauger of beer-barrels, it was all
    well; we were glad to be told our faults and to look forward to the
    coming millennium, when all men, having sufficiently studied the works
    of Dr Anticant, would become truthful and energetic.  But the doctor
    mistook the signs of the times and the minds of men, instituted
    himself censor of things in general, and began the great task of
    reprobating everything and everybody, without further promise of any
    millennium at all.  This was not so well; and, to tell the truth, our
    author did not succeed in his undertaking.  His theories were all
    beautiful, and the code of morals that he taught us certainly an
    improvement on the practices of the age.  We all of us could, and many
    of us did, learn much from the doctor while he chose to remain vague,
    mysterious, and cloudy: but when he became practical, the charm was
    gegangen.
     
    His allusion to the poet and the partridges was received very well.
    “Oh, my poor brother,” said he, “slaughtered partridges a score of
    brace to each gun, and poets gauging ale-barrels, with sixty pounds a
    year, at Dumfries, are not the signs of a great era!—perhaps of the
    smallest possible era yet written of.  Whatever economies we pursue,
    political or other, let us see at once that this is the maddest of the
    uneconomic: partridges killed by our land magnates at, shall we say,
    a guinea a head, to be retailed in Leadenhall at one shilling and
    ninepence, with one poacher in limbo for every fifty birds! our poet,
    maker, creator, gauging ale, and that badly, with no leisure for
    making or creating, only a little leisure for drinking, and such like
    beer-barrel avocations!  Truly, a cutting of blocks with fine razors
    while we scrape our chins so uncomfortably with rusty knives!  Oh, my
    political economist, master of supply and demand, division of labour
    and high pressure—oh, my loud-speaking friend, tell me, if so much
    be in you, what is the demand for poets in these kingdoms of Queen
    Victoria, and what the vouchsafed supply?”
     
    This was