DELAFIELD'S ENTIRE.
BANKRUPTS are compelled to parade their follies in open court, and journalists duly improve the occasion to moralize the tale: Mr. Delafield goes into the Gazette, and the critic goes into the morals of Mr. Delafield's ledger. The obvious fact is the mon- strous waste of resources. Here is a young man born not only to the world but to a brewery, and yet so wholly unable to appre- ciate the bounty of his lot, that he transfers his fortunes from the brewhouse to the playhouse—from the vat to the quagmire. A hundred thousand pounds was the value of his share of the brewery in 1845 ' • a hundred thousand pounds' worth of a brewery is some thousands a year in the profit on ale and porter ; but a hundred thousand pounds sunk in a playhouse has no more marketable value than the horse and accoutrements of Curtius. The Times duly notes, that for the yearly income, a single man, without encumbrances, and with a good digestion, might have any gratification that he could desire ; but as Mr. Edward Dela- field was born to his position in trade, he did not know the value of it ; so he let it slip from him, as he would not have done if he had earned it by hard work. That conclusion is by no means so unquestionable as it seems. It is quite true. that a man who accumulates a hundred thousand pounds knows the dif4Culty. a the process, and is more likely to keep a fast hold of hie 'gains : it 'does not follow that he knows the value any better thanl-tliiiiipendthrift. In one sense, and a
very true 'One you Me that giViard Delafield knew the
value of mono miser; . Veal better flail Elwes the miser, since he got something for the coin that he gave away, whereas the miser gets nothing for the treasure that he keeps. The miser has the money, but not its value. The spendthrift lives on capital as well as income ; the miser lives on neither. There is some delusion about these bankruptcies. They may derange trade ; but do they proportionately diminish produc- tion ? Is there a loaf the less because the 100,000/. which stood in Mr. Delafield's name now stands in somebody else's, or even because the creditors of the 33,0001. unsecured debts do not recover their capital ? Alack ! there is in this country so much capital and to spare, that the withdrawal of that amount from the money-market—if it is withdrawn—will not cause the price of bread to fall by the smallest fraction of a farthing which it is possible to state in figures. The wonder on this occasion is, that the spenders get so little for their money ; a fact which throws the greatest slur on the savoir vivre of the day. Mr. Delafield probably got more than the common run of fortune-dispersers, since he had a brief reign of that power which has tempted all classes, the management of a theatre ; and in his case the reign was of a peculiarly agreeable order, as the subjects were all artistica], and many of them beautiful ; yet when the bankruptcy-law discloses his home, it is not of a startlingly enviable kind—a toy house on the banks of the Thames, with gewgaw furniture and indif- ferent specimens of art. All that a man seems able to do for his hundred thousand is still rude and flat. It is almost always so when you uncover these things, in England at least. Willow Bank was a poor Brummagem casino; Strawberry Hill must have been a flat affair ; the more one sees into Lord Hertford's menage, the less paradisaic it looks. Fiction is still before fact in these things. Monte Cristo adorned his wild revenge with higher graces ; Cogia Hassan the ropemaker found real happiness with his diamond ; Noureddin Ali must have had a good deal of ecstacy in his spendthrift fling, though he was a Mussulman and ready to sell his Fair Persian : but in all these cases, and many more besides, there is some grace of art, some life of heart in the tale. Perhaps the difference arises from the fact that it is a poet of some kind who makes the tale according to his own genius. Perhaps this part of the story never comes out fully in real life. Be that as it may, these spendthrift disclosures expose not more waste of substance than poverty of invention and skill in the art of living, even according to the gay sense.
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