Page:Marie Corelli - the writer and the woman (IA mariecorelliwrit00coat).pdf/360

 out a check on his own account and send it back with the rejected story. Turning to women writers, has not Mrs. Gaskell, in her touching life of Charlotte Brontë, told us how she and the poor Yorkshire clergyman's daughter paid sundry afternoon calls in the Haworth district, and how welcome was the novelist's "quiet presence" in many humble homes? Ruskin's kindness and open-handed charity, as one who visited him has told us, were proverbial in the Brantwood neighborhood. The history of Dr. Johnson's home life proves amply the tenderness which lay behind his pompous and dictatorial manner. Poor Goldsmith's generosity amounted almost to a vice, for he would borrow a guinea to give to a friend in need and empty his pockets for a whining mendicant. His philanthropy was wholesale, and quite lacked any sense of proportion. Scott worked himself to death to pay off the debts of the publishing firm in which he was concerned;—turn where you will, you find that the men and women whose work in life has been the making of songs and dramas and novels, have ever been keenly alive to the distress prevalent among their fellow-creatures, and have seldom been guilty of anything approaching selfishness.

It would not be meet in the present work to touch in any but the most passing way on Miss Corelli's