for his character you will not do. These persons are also poor-light come, light go-and the bubble bursts at last. Yet if they had employed the same time and pains in any laudable art or study that they have in raising a surreptitious livelihood, they would have been respectable, if not rich. It is their facility in borrowing money that has ruined them. No one will set heartily to work, who has the face to enter a strange house, ask the master of it for a considerable loan, on some plausible and pompous pretext, and walk off with it in his pocket. You might as well suspect a highwayman of addicting himself to hard study in the intervals of his profession. There is only one other class of persons I can think of, in connexion with the subject of this Essay-those who are always in want of money from the want of spirit to make use of it. Such persons are perhaps more to be pitied than all the rest. They live in want, in the midst of plenty-dare not touch what belongs to them, are afraid to say that their soul is their own, have their wealth locked up from them by fear and meanness as effectually as by bolts and bars, scarcely allow themselves a coat to their backs or a morsel to eat, are in dread of coming to the parish all their lives, and are not sorry when they die, to think that they shall no longer be an expense to themselves according to the old epigram: "Here lies Father Clarges, Who died to save charges!" ESSAY XV. ON THE FEELING OF IMMORTALITY IN YOUTH. No young man believes he shall ever die. It was a saying of my brother's, and a fine one. There is a feeling of Eternity in youth which makes us amends for every thing. To be young is to be as one of the Immortals. One half of time indeed is spent-the other half remains in store for us with all its countless treasures, for there is no line drawn, and we see no limit to our hopes and wishes. make the coming age our own "The vast, the unbounded prospect lies before us." We Death, old age, are words without a meaning, a dream, a fiction, with which we have nothing Others may have undergone, or may to do. |