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Perhaps you will remember certain masters of avarice pictured in former scenes of this comedy of human life: in the first place the provincial minister, Pere Grandet of Saumur, miserly as a tiger is cruel; next Gobseck, the usurer, that Jesuit of gold, delighting only in its power, and relishing the tears of the unfortunate because gold produced them; then Baron Nucingen, lifting base and fraudulent money transactions to the level of State policy.
Though anything but miserly, he had, where his interests were concerned, an extraordinary cunning and pertinacity; he was universally regarded as one of the shrewdest men of business in that part of Yorkshire, and report credited him with any number of remarkable meannesses.
Tell me your secret; who are you, and how did you come here? I love you very much, and if you would like to leave this place I will go with you. I have wealth equal to the treasure of the miserly Qarūn. But the prince only made answer like a man distraught, and told her nothing.
Our miserly and dirty ex-cook had an old pair of trousers that some one had given to him; after he had long worn them himself, with one of the sorely decayed legs he hired a man to carry his heavy load a whole day; a second man carried it the next day for the other leg, and what remained of the old garment, without the buttons, procured the labour of another man for the third day.
And so this business ended to our great satisfaction, we saying to ourselves that we had done all that man could to redeem the captives, and that it would be no harm at all to put a cheat upon the miserly steward. Whether we were any way more honest than he in shaping our conduct according to our inclinations is a question which troubled us then very little.
"Ah! taxes are high, are they?" said the viscount, preoccupied with his own ideas. "I don't know," replied the abbe. "My niece manages the property of each of us." "Taxes are not of much importance to the rich," said Mademoiselle Cormon, not wishing to be thought miserly.
He was a mean, miserly, grasping man, who had no regard for the feelings or comfort of anyone else; whose master passion was a selfish love of accumulating money. His money did him little good, however, for he was as mean with himself as with others, and grudged himself even the necessaries of life, because, if purchased, it must be at the expense of his hoards.
But you and I, reader, have no other interest in these poems, except this that they were written by the brother-in-law of that whimsical, miserly Frank Vance, who perhaps, but for such a brother-in-law, would never have gone through the labour by which he has cultivated the genius that achieved his fame; and if he had not cultivated that genius, he might never have known Lionel; and if he had never known Lionel, Lionel might never perhaps have gone to the Surrey village, in which he saw the Phenomenon: And, to push farther still that Voltaireian philosophy of ifs if either Lionel or Frank Vance had not been so intimately associated in the minds of Sophy and Lionel with the golden holiday on the beautiful river, Sophy and Lionel might not have thought so much of those poems; and if they had not thought so much of those poems, there might not have been between them that link of poetry without which the love of two young people is a sentiment, always very pretty it is true, but much too commonplace to deserve special commemoration in a work so uncommonly long as this is likely to be.
I have just said, that you may be great artists, and yet be miserly and jealous, and troubled about many things. So you may be; but I said also that the miserliness or trouble must not be in your hearts all day.
Some thought that he was the 'Tom Folio' of Addison's caricature, in which it was assumed that the study of bibliography was only fit for a 'learned idiot. Hearne defended his friend from the charge of pedantry, and declared that the mistake could only be made by a 'shallow buffoon. Rawlinson had a miserly craving after good books.
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