IMPROVIDENCE OF GREAT MEN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume IV, Issue 187, 27 October 1876, Page 7

IMPROVIDENCE OF GREAT MEN.

[BY SAMUEL SMIIiLES.] The folly of some men renowned for great wisdom is conspicuous in every country. Their foolishness is made manifest in common affairs of private life, even when the world is ringing with public applause for the exhibition of profound wisdom in public affairs. The proverbial unthriftiness and folly in expenditure characteristic of our Daniel Webster is "well known. He was always receiving large sums as income, and yet involved in debt. He could take care of the affairs of the nation, but not of his own. Lord Bacon was another instance of similar improvidence. Bacon himself did nofc follow his own advice, but was ruined by his improvidence. He was in straits and difficulties when a youth, and in life was splendid, but his excessive expenditure involved him in debt, which created a perpetual craving for money. Bacon took bribes, and wis thereupon beset by his enemies, convicted, degraded and ruined. Pitt managed the national finances during a period of unexampled difficulty, yet was himself always plunged in debt. Lord Carrington, ex-banker, once or twice, at Mr. Pitt's request, examined his household accounts, and found the quantity of butchers' meat charged in the bills at one hundred weight a week. The charge for servants 5 wages, board wages, living and household bills i excoedad .£2,300 a year. At Pitt's death the nation voted .£IO,OOO to satisfy the demands of his creditors; yet his income had never been loss than .£6,000 a year, and at one time, with the wardenship oi the Cinque Ports, it was nearly a year more. Macauliiy truly says that " the character of Pitt would have stood higher if, with the disinterestedness of Pericles and De Witt, he had united their dignified frugality." But Pitt by no weans stood alone. Lord Melville Avas as unthrifty in the management of his own affairs as he was of the money of the public. Fox was an enormous owner, his financial maxim being that a man need never want money if he was able to pay enough for it. Fox called the outer room at Almack's, where he borrowed on occasions from .Tew lenders at exhorbitant premiums, his " Jerusalem Chamber." Passion for play was his great vice, and at a very early age it involved him in debt to an enormous amount. It is stated by Gibson that on one occasion Pox sat playing at hazard for twenty hours in succession, losing £11,000. But deep play was the vice of high life in those days, and cheating was not unknown. Sehvyn, alluding to Fox's losses at play, called him Charles the martyr. Sheridan was the hero of debt. He lived on it. Though he received large sums of money in one way or another, no one knew what became of it, for he paid nobody. It semed to melt away in his hands like snow in Summer. He spent his first wife's fortune

of .£16,000 in a six-week's jaunt at Bath. Necessity drove him to literature, and, perhaps, to the stimulus of poverty we owe " The Rivals," and the drama 3 which followed it. With his second wife he obtained a fortune of .£5,000, and, -with £15,000 which he realised by the sale of Drury Lane shares, he bought an estate in Surrey, from which he was driven by debts and duns. The remainder of his Me was a series of shifts, sometimes brilliant, but of tener degrading, to raise money and evade creditors. Taylor, of the Opera House, used to say that if he took off his hat to Sheridan in the street it would cost him .£SO, but if he stopped to speak to him it would cost him .£IOO. He was in debt all round —to his milkman, his grocer, his baker, and his butcher. Sometimes Mrs. Sheridan would be kept waiting for an hour or more while the servants were beating up the neighbourhood for coffee, butter, eggs, and rolls. While Sheridan was paymaster of the navy, a butcher one day brought a leg of mutton to the kitchen. The cook took it and clapped it into the pot to boil, and went upstairs for the money ; but not returning, the butcher coolly removed the pot-lid, took out the mutton, and walked away with it in his tray. Yet, while living in these straits, Sheridan, when invited with his son into the country, usually went in chaises and four — he in one, and his son Tom followed in the other. The end of all was very sad. For some weeks before his death he was nearly destitute of the means of subsistence. His noble and royal friends had entirely deserted him. Executions for debt were in his house, and he passed his list days in the custody of sheriffs' officers, who abstained from carrying him to prison merely because they Avere assured that to remove him would cause his immediate death.