Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/151

 neath. You start in the attic, and work your way down to the first-floor.

A good many great men have lived in attics, and some have died there. Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths that no one wants to hear—these are the lumber that the world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic, and Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly—too soundly sometimes—upon their truckle beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship, and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age—alas! a drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamt his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leant his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled, when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer-the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were reared two storeys high, has the garret been the nursery of genius.