But if you are acting right, I should be acting right in imitating you. What, then, would George Burnett do--he "whom you seduced
"With other promises and other vaunts Than to repent, boasting _you_ could subdue Temptation!"
He cannot go into the Church, for you did "give him principles"! and I wish that you had indeed "learnt from him how infinitely more to be valued is integrity of heart than effulgence of intellect." Nor can he go into the law, for the same _principles_ declare against it, and he is not calculated for it. And his father will not support any expense of consequence relative to his further education--for Law or Physic he could not take his degree in, or be called to, without sinking of many hundred pounds. What, Southey, was George Burnett to do?
Then, even if you had persisted in your design of taking Orders, your motives would have been weak and shadowy and vile; but when you changed your ground for the Law they were annihilated. No man dreams of getting bread in the Law, till six or eight years after his first entrance at the Temple. And how very few even then? Before this time your brothers would have been put out, and the money which you must of necessity have sunk in a wicked profession would have given your brother an education, and provided a premium fit for the first compting-house in the world. But I hear that you have again changed your ground. You do not now mean to study the Law, but to maintain yourself by your writings and on your promised annuity, which, you told Mrs. Morgan, would be more than a hundred a year. Could you not have done the same with _us_? I neither have nor could deign to have a hundred a year. Yet by my own exertions I will struggle hard to maintain myself, and my wife, and my wife's mother and my associate. Or what if you dedicated this hundred a year to your family? Would you not be precisely as I am? Is not George Burnett accurate when he undoubtedly ascribes your conduct to an unparticipating propensity--to a total want of the boasted _flocci-nauci-nihili-pilificating_ sense? O selfish, money-loving man! What principle have you not given up? Though death had been the consequence, I would have spat in that man's face and called him liar, who should have spoken that last sentence concerning _you_ nine months ago. For blindly did I esteem you. O God! that _such a mind_ should fall in love with that low, dirty, gutter-grubbing trull, _Worldly Prudence_!