the picture?" And what, pray, is the use of the fine house or costly furniture, unless to be looked at, to be admired, and to display the taste and magnificence of the owner? Are not pictures and statues as much furniture as gold plate or jasper tables; or does the circumstance of the former having a meaning in them and appealing to the imagination as well as to the senses, neutralize their virtue and render it entirely chimerical and visionary? It is true, every one must have a house of some kind, furnished somehow, and the superfluous so far grows imperceptibly out of the necessary. But a fine house, fine furniture is necessary to no man, nor of more value than the plainest, except as a matter of taste, of fancy, of luxury, and ostentation. Again, no doubt, if a person is in the habit of keeping a number of servants, and entertaining a succession of fashionable guests, he must have more room than he wants for himself, apartments suitably decorated to receive them, and offices and stables for their horses and retinue. But is all this unavoidably dictated as a consequence of his attention to the main chance, or is it not sacrificing the latter and making it a stalking-horse to his vanity, dissipation, or love of society and hospitality? We are at least as fond of spending money as

VOL. II.

U

of making it. If a man runs through a fortune in the way here spoken of; is it out of love to himself? Yet who scruples to run through a fortune in this way, or accuses himself of any extraordinary disinterestedness or love of others? One bed is as much as any one can sleep in, one room is as much as he can dine in, and he may have another for study or to retire to after dinner; but he can only want more than this for the accommodation of his friends or the admiration of the stranger. At Fonthill Abbey (to take an extreme illustration) there was not a single room fit to sit, lie, or stand in the whole was cut up into pigeon holes, or spread out into long endless galleries. The building this huge, ill-assorted pile cost, I believe, nearly a million of money; and if the circumstance was mentioned, it occasioned an expression of surprise at the amount of the wealth that had been thus squandered; but if it was said that a hundred pounds had been laid out on a highly finished picture, there was the same astonishment expressed at its misdirection. The sympathetic auditor makes up his mind to the first and greatest outlay, by reflecting that in case of the worst the building materials alone will fetch something considerable; or in the very idea of stone walls and mortar there is something

solid and tangible, that repels the charge of frivolous levity or fine sentiment. This quaint excrescence in architecture, preposterous and illconstructed as it was, occasioned, I suspect, many a heart-ache and bitter comparison to the throng of fashionable visitants; and I conceive it was the very want of comfort and convenience that enhanced this feeling, by magnifying as it were from contrast the expence that had been incurred in realising an idle whim. When we judge thus perversely and invidiously of the employment of wealth by others, I cannot think that we are guided in our own choice of means to ends by a simple calculation of downright use and personal accommodation. The gentleman who purchased Fonthill, and was supposed to be possessed of wealth enough to purchase half a dozen more Fonthills, lived there himself for some time in a state of the greatest retirement; rose at six, and read till four, rode out for an hour for the benefit of the air, and dined abstemiously for the sake of his health. I could do all this myself. What then became of the rest of his fortune? It was lying in the funds or embarked in business to make it yet greater: that he might still rise at six and read till four, &c. It was of no other earthly use to him; for he did not wish to make a figure in

ment.

the world, or to throw it away on studs of horses, or equipages, entertainments, gaming, electioneering, subscriptions to charitable institutions, mistresses, or any of the usual fashionable modes of squandering wealth for the amusement and wonder of others and our own fancied enjoyMr Farquhar did not probably lay out five hundred a-year on himself: yet it cost Mr Beckford, who also led a life of perfect seclusion, twenty thousand a-year to defray the expenses of his table and of his household establishment. When I find that such and so various are the tastes of men, I am a little puzzled to know what is meant by self-interest, of which some persons talk so fluently, as if it was a jack-ina-bor, which they could take out and show you, and which they tell you is the object that all men equally aim at. If money, is it for its own other things? Is it to

sake, or the sake of hoard it, or to spend it on ourselves or others? In all these points, we find the utmost diversity and contradiction, both of feeling and practice. Certainly he who puts his money into a strong box, and he who puts it into a dice-box, must be allowed to have a very different idea of the main chance. If by this phrase be understood a principle of self-preservation, I grant that while we live, we must not starve, and that

necessity has no law. Beyond this point, all seems nearly left to chance or whim, and so far are all the world from being agreed in their definition of this redoubtable term, that one half of them may be said to think and act in diametrical opposition to the other.

Avarice is the miser's dream, as fame is the poet's. A calculation of physical profit or loss is almost as much out of the question in the one case as in the other. The one has set his mind on gold, the other on praise, as the summum bonum or object of his bigoted idolatry and daily contemplation, not for any private and sinister ends. It is the immediate pursuit, not the remote or reflex consequence that gives wings to the passion. There is indeed a reference to self in either case that fixes and concentrates it, but not a gross or sordid one. Is not the desire to accumulate and leave a vast estate behind us, equally romantic with the desire to leave a posthumous name behind us? Is not the desire of distinction, of something to be known and remembered by, the paramount consideration? And are not the privations we undergo, the sacrifices and exertions we make for either object nearly akin? A child makes a huge snow-ball to show his skill and perseverance, and as something to wonder at, not