There must be many people to whom the above heading will be at once suggestive of the famous chapter upon Snakes in Iceland; but to the philosophical mind—and it is marvellous how philosophical one can become under adversity—there are certain compensating advantages in the state of ruin, which, if not quite so intense as the Pleasures of Hope, or Memory, or Imagination, do much to reconcile us to the change in our circumstances. The first feeling is one of extreme relief that the whole thing is over and we are out of suspense. The smash has come; writs and summonses have blossomed into sheriffs’ officers, and the auctioneer, whose fell and inexorable hammer has made short work of our goods and chattels; our wealthy friends have said that they knew it would come to this; and Jones, who used to look dinners and five-pound notes at us whenever he met us formerly, now crosses over to the opposite side of the street. The cheap lodgings in the shady neighbourhood have become hard and ineradicable facts, and we can look about us at last and endeavour to make the best we can of the position.

You now have a newly acquired sense of freedom and independence to which perhaps you have long been a stranger. It is no longer a question of whether you shall dine at the Bristol or the Blue Posts, but in all likelihood the choice will lie between the diner du jour in Leicester Square, a chop, or Duke Humphrey. Nor, if you be a married man, need you now vex your soul with the proper precedence of a brigadier-general, an Indian judge, a colonial bishop, and a resident commissioner from the Punjab, as has happened in the days gone by when you gave a dinner. Nor will the varying merits of asparagus soup and turtle, salmon mayonnaise and aspic of lobster, truffled turkey and oyster-stuffed capon, and all the rest of it, come between you and your night’s rest. Again, your circumstances are such that you are no longer harassed by the touters for subscriptions, male and female, and you find it therefore needless to discuss the comparative merits of the claims put forward by the friends of the Cannibal Islanders for French mustard, and by the friends of the Mayor of Little Pedlington for a new pump in the market-place in honour of that excellent cheesemonger and municipal chief.

When you go to the theatre or opera, you are no longer compelled to pay fifty or a hundred per cent. for the privilege of receiving your ticket from an agent, and you go to the pit, where, if the orange peel and ginger beer and nuts are a bit of a nuisance at first, you are not long in getting used to it; and at anyrate you are permitted to hear the piece without being bored by one of Smith’s ‘good stories’ during Patti’s chief aria, or while Irving is giving some fine piece of declamation. You discover sources of gratuitous amusement which indifference has hitherto hidden from you. That glorious rotunda in Bloomsbury, the British Museum Reading-room—the mausoleum of the mind of the world—gives you opportunities for study and recreation of which you have never before thought of availing yourself; and the treasures of South Kensington and the National Gallery, which you have hitherto neglected as ‘slow’ and ‘bad form,’ are now a source of delight to you. The only fault that you can now find with the latter institution is, that it spoils you for all the modern galleries about Pall Mall and Piccadilly. You have a feeling of proprietorship now in the royal parks, which you never had when you sauntered in the Row, or attended the meet of the Coaching Club at the Magazine, or dawdled about the Mall in St James’s Park on a Drawing-room day. You don’t attend these ‘functions’ now, for, though they are open to you as to the rest of the world, you feel yourself rather out of the race. But you often enjoy the air in the higher ground of Hyde Park, which you will come to consider as bracing as the Sussex Downs; nor are you to be persuaded that Burnham Beeches has a much finer show of trees than Kensington Gardens.

But the time when you do really and thoroughly enjoy the Pleasures of Ruin is when that delectable moment comes—which it inevitably will, sooner or later—when a temporary, or, let us hope, it may be a permanent, change in your fortunes takes place. Your book has found a publisher; your picture a buyer; some one pays up an old debt; or an unknown relative mentions your name in his will. Whatever it may be, the keen appreciation of the benefits we formerly enjoyed which our vicissitudes have taught us, and the knowledge we have acquired of the dingier side of nature, give a remarkable zest to our return to a brighter life. And if a man has good health and good spirits, he will find that it is as true that ‘hope springs eternal in the human breast,’ as that when things are at their worst they mend; and if he is of an extra-hopeful disposition, he will welcome the increased depression of his fortunes as a sure forerunner of a change of luck.