Sometimes, however, these qualities are modified and appear rather as a tendency to adventure money in pursuance of a great idea thus, Sir Isaac Pitman was constantly in the direst straits for cash, not because he failed to earn it, or because he squandered what he had, but because with him every interest was subordinated to that of establishing his system of shorthand. ‘Arc ye not of more value than many sparrows.’ ‘Freely have ye received, freely give’. ‘Take no thought for the morrow’, said the Saviour ‘consider the lilies how they grow’. More than this, extravagance is definitely one of the Christian virtues. It is only natural that one should value a little what one obtains without great effort. When you sit down and do a week’s work and receive a year’s income in return for it, it is only natural that you should feel wildly optimistic, and when for the next week’s work you only get six month’s income, you become unreasonably depressed, ‘Easy come, easy go’ too is a very good rule about money. It is all part of the psychology of gambling. It is not necessary to describe Uranus as malefic to explain these facts. The same story is true of Balzac, but with him he was always in actual extremity, ever on the point of being sold out, although receiving at frequent intervals sums almost beyond the dreams of avarice. Stranger still is the case of Byron, who received thousands upon thousands of pounds from his publisher, ~Murray, yet who felt so bitterly the slings of poverty that he sent Murray a bible for a present with the sentence ‘Now Barabbas was a publisher‘, for ‘robber’. He was another of those rich men who are always hard up. He netted twelve thousand pounds sterling straight off from The Arabian Nights alone, yet fortune constantly played traitor to him. He made very large sums of money from time to time by the sale of his books. Sir Richard Burton is another case in point. The Tranby Croft scandal and the Gordon Cumming trial which nearly wrecked the monarchical system in England may be regarded as directly due to this position. It will be remembered that his difficulties even led him to accept invitations which one in his position should hardly’ have done. He gambled desperately and put himself in the hands of the money lenders. Edward VII, until he became king, was in constant straits for money. We have four very striking examples of people with this position. For people whose personality is conventional, this state of things will be extremely depressing the artist’s temperament or the gambler’s temperament 01: the temperament of the religious man soon accommodates itself to the fact. Something always turns lip at the last moment. But in whatever straits they may find themselves, they never actually starve. Very likely they lose or spend it almost as soon as they get it. People with this position of Uranus go on making nothing for a long time, and then make a lot. For the sudden vicissitudes which he brings are all in the day’s work if you are playing poker, and to win a jack-pot with four threes against an ace fully compensates for a hundred hand that were not worth drawing to. He is certainly bad for steady businesses, such as that of the grocer, or the baker, but for businesses which are gambling from first to last, like publishing, he may not be so bad. With regard to material possessions of the nature of ready money, earned money and money acquired in business, Uranus may be considered fortunate or otherwise very much in accordance with the nature of the business.
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