The chief circumstance of distinction, then, of the theory which I have ventured to propose to you, from the evident inadequacy of the common theory, is, that instead of making the passion of the miser to depend on the pleasing association of enjoyment, it founds it chiefly on an association of an opposite kind of the painful feeling of regret. The remembrances which rise to his mind, are not so much those of the few moments of some agreeable purchase, as of the more lasting wish, that the purchase had not been made. It is not happiness, then, in its shadowy form, which is for ever playing around his heart, even when he contemplates the very symbols of happiness. It is possible pain, not possible pleasure-fear, far more than hope,— poverty itself, with all the wretched images of the wants that attend it, in the very redundancy of a wealth which it would weary every one but its neverweary possessor and calculator to compute. This theory of avarice, as founded on suggestions of regret and not of pleasure, explains very readily some facts, which otherwise, I cannot but think, would be absolutely inexplicable. Nothing is more truly remarkable, for example, than the disproportioned vexation of the miser at losses of very different amount. The loss of a guinea, or even of a shilling, gives him frequently the same uneasiness as the loss of a thousand guineas; and he who would not give away a guinea without the most compunctious terror, has sometimes been known to give away one thousand, perhaps with less difficulty, certainly with less appearance of anxiety, than if it had been a much smaller sum. The reason of this apparent disproportion I conceive to be, that the feeling of regret, which I regard as the predominant feeling in the complex associations of the miser, has been more frequently attached to the loss of a smaller sum, such as that which is given away in common purchases, and arises, therefore, more readily to the mind, merely because it has been thus more frequently associated. A guinea has been regretted a thousand times a thousand guineas have, perhaps, never once been regretted, because they have never been given away before. A large sum may, indeed, be analyzed into its constituent parts, with the conception of the loss of which the painful regret might be supposed to arise as before; but this analytic reduction requires an operation of thought, which takes place less readily than the simple suggestion of feelings, attached by frequent recurrence to the petty loss itself. So much of avarice, at least of what appears most ridiculous and sordid in avarice, consists in the pitiful saving of a few shillings of those small sums which occur to the demand of every hour, and admit, therefore, of "being most frequently combined with regret in some stronger or slighter degree, that it has been said, with great truth, that a very few pounds in the year, laid out as other people would lay them out, would save almost any one from being counted a miser. -a It is for the same reason, I may remark, that it is very difficult for those, who, in early youth, have struggled with extreme penury, and who have been suddenly raised to affluence, not to have at their heart what may seem like original constitutional avarice to those who do not reflect on its cause,love of money, when the love of money seems so little necessary to them,— a terror of expense, which was once only economy, but which is economy no more. They carry with them the feelings that have attended their expenses, in a situation in which any little gain was of great relative value, and any little departure from extreme frugality would have been ruin; and hence, perhaps, with every desire of doing good, when they think of their large fortune, and of the means of bounty which it affords them, they do little good in detail, because, in their actual benefactions, the feelings which they have been accustomed to attach to sums that were once great to them, continue still, by the influence of mere association, to arise, when the sums which they tremble to give away are, in relation to their ample means, truly insignificant. A few guineas in their charities as in their expenses of every sort, seem to them a large sum, because they seemed to them a large sum, for the greater part, perhaps, of a long life. They are misers merely because they once were poor, not because they are indifferent to distress. When, in such circumstances of sudden change of fortune, the heart readily adapts itself to the change, it may be considered as a proof, that he who is now rich, has, even in indigence, been accustomed to look to wealth chiefly as an instrument of gratifying those generous wishes which he now, therefore, delights to gratify,-unrestrained in his bounty by any feeling of regret, because the chief regret which he felt before, was that of not being able to bestow a relief, the power of bestowing which he now feels to be so inestimable a part of riches. In these remarks on the growth of avarice, I have considered chiefly that part of the process which is the least obvious. There is one more obvious circumstance, which is, of course, not to be neglected in the theory of this passion, the distinction which great wealth confers, like every thing which is possessed only by a few, and which all, or nearly all, are desirous of possessing. Of the influence of this mere distinction as an object of satisfaction and desire to the miser, there can be no doubt; and it is an influence which increases always as the amount of wealth already accumulated increases. The smallest subtraction from the illustrious amount, lessens in his own eyes his own dignity. It seems to him delightful to be constantly adding to that which, at every addition, makes him more and more illustrious. To take any thing from the heap reverses this process. He feels that he is less than he was; and with this feeling, which is painful in itself, he does not pause to think how very little he is less; and how very near in glory one who possesses a hundred thousand pounds, is to him who possesses a hundred thousand pounds and a shilling. The union of all these feelings, in their highest degree, is probably necessary to form the perfect miser, as he exists only, in rare cases, for the admiration of the world. But in those half-misers, of whom the world is full, they exist in various degrees and proportions, producing those singular contrasts of feelings and situations, which would be ridiculous, if they were not lamentable, and disgusting. "Not only the low-born and old Think glory nothing but the beams of gold, The first young lord, whom in the Mall you meet, And starves, to join a penny to a plum.- According as these feelings rise more or less strongly, and, in a great mea * Young's Love of Fame, Sat. IV. sure, according as the notion of any particular sum, which may suggest either the enjoyment that may be afforded by it, or the regret that may attend its loss, suggests one of these rather than the other, we are to account for those sudden alternations of avarice and generosity which occasionally appear in the same character. "There is no one circumstance," says Fielding, "in which the distempers of the mind bear a more exact analogy to those which are called bodily, than in that aptness which both have to a relapse. This is plain in the violent diseases of ambition and avarice. I have known ambition, when cured at court by frequent disappointments, (which are the only physic for it,) to break out again in a contest for foreman of the grand jury at an assizes, and have heard of a man who had so far conquered avarice, as to give away many a sixpence, that comforted himself at last, on his deathbed, by making a crafty and advantageous bargain concerning his ensuing funeral with an undertaker who had married his only child." It is very evident, according to that analysis of the passion of the miser, on which I have ventured, that the mere circumstance of approaching and certain death, as in the case now quoted, could not have any great effect in lessening the delight of such a bargain; because the delight of profit to the miser does not depend on enjoyment afterwards to arise from it, but on feelings of the past, associated with the mere gain itself, or with the loss of gain. Gain is still delightful, loss still painful to him, in the same way as in emotions that agree scarcely in any other respect, the scenes and countenances which he loves, are still beautiful to him who knows that death is soon to separate him from every thing which he admires on earth, and that the loveliness, therefore, which he still sees in all its eloquent expression of continued gentleness and kindness, is a loveliness that in all which it expresses, must be lost to him. It is equally evident, according to the same analysis, that an accession of wealth, however great, to that which was perhaps only a competence before, will have little chance of lessening avarice, but may, on the contrary, as we see with surprise in many cases of this strange moral anomaly, increase the very avarice that was before scarcely marked as sordid, by rendering more valuable that rich amount which it would be painful to diminish by such ordinary expenses as even frugality allows. The larger the sum possessed, the more nearly does it approach to that beautiful combination of arithmetical figures which delights the imagination as often as it rises like a dream of heaven, and which is, indeed, the only dream of heaven that does arise to the miser, in that voluntary wretchedness to which he has condemned himself,a wretchedness that has all the mortifications of penance, without the thoughts of virtue and holiness, by which penance is more than soothed, and that must be ever miserable, because a cessation of the miseries that are thus voluntarily induced, would be itself a wretchedness still more dreadful than what is voluntarily suffered. There are various applications of the theory, which flow from it so evidently, that it is unnecessary to occupy your time in pointing them out. One conclusion, however, of great practical importance, it may be of advantage to state particularly. If avarice, as I conceive, has its origin chiefly in the feelings of regret that attend the early expenses of the child, it must be of the utmost importance to prevent, as much as possible, these primary feelings of regret, by endeavouring to lead him to employ the little money which is at his disposal, in such a manner as may make the very remembrance of VOL. II. 25 194 66 III. PROSPECTIVE EMOTIONS, we on the little transfer pleasing to him. When the child hastens to throw away whatever is given to him, in the gratification of his gluttonous appetite, think that we perceive only prodigality arising. It is future parsimony, the contrary, which we chiefly see, a parsimony which will be quick to regret, because it has been thoughtlessly quick to squander, or rather, it is that mixture of prodigality and avarice which almost every prodigal exhibits, -that societas luxuriæ et sordium, of which the younger Pliny speaks with so much detestation, when he describes them as singly most unworthy of the noble nature of man, but still more wretchedly disgraceful, when combined, quæ cum sint turpissima, discreta ac separata, turpius junguntur." Even in mature life, the very necessities to which luxurious extravagance leads, preclude all possibility of being generous; and the generous desires which it is thus impossible to gratify, merely on account of selfish indulgencies, soon cease to be felt at all. The prodigal is thus almost necessarily a miser, without thinking that he is so; because he is constantly throwing away the money which he obtains, he forgets the rapacity of his desires themselves; his avarice is not, indeed, the avarice of him who lives and dies in rags and wretchedness, but to borrow a very happy expression of Marmontel, it “is a mixture of all the passions which can be satisfied with gold." LECTURE LXX. III. PROSPECTIVE EMOTIONS.-6. DESIRE OF POWER-OF INDIRECT POW- My last Lecture, gentlemen, was occupied with an inquiry into the nature of one of the most seemingly anomalous of human passions, a passion that has for its object what is directly valuable only in relation to other desires, that disregards, however, the gratification of these very desires to which its object may be considered only as instrumental, and that yet continues, with mad avidity, to labour to accumulate what, but for the enjoyments which are despised and viewed almost with terror, is a burden, and nothing more,—a mass of cumbrous matter, which it is difficult to acquire, and anxious to keep, of no more value in itself when stamped with the marks of national currency, than when it was buried, with other dross, in the original darkness of the mine. In what manner the passion of avarice is most probably formed in the mind, I endeavoured to explain to you, by a retrospect of the circumstances that may be supposed most likely to diversify the early pecuniary transactions of the little barterer, who begins, in his exchange of pence for toys and sweetmeats, that traffic, which, in more important purchases, is to continue through life, which renders the preservation of life itself, and the enjoy ment of all its external pleasures a sort of commerce, and makes merchants, therefore, in the strictest sense of that term, of the proudest of mankind, who may think, perhaps, that the merchandise which they exercise is dig fied by the name of expense, but who, in their most luxurious and prodigal expenses, are only traders in gold and commodities,-the barterers of certain sums of gold for certain quantities of other commodities, which, by mutual consent, are received as equivalents. In this retrospect of the circumstances in which the passion of the young miser may be supposed to originate, we found reason to ascribe it to a process different from that which is commonly assigned as its origin and explained, I flatter myself, in conformity with the theory which we were led to form, many seeming irregularities with respect to the influence of the passion, for which it does not seem easy to account, on any other principle. In relation to the general moral character of the individual who is subject to it, it would not be easy to find a passion that strips him so completely of all that was originally noble in his constitution, as avarice in its extreme deAlmost every other passion, however inconsistent it may be, with the higher honours of our social nature, has yet some direct relation to mankind. Sensuality itself is not wholly selfish. The more refined voluptuary seeks society to enliven and embellish his pleasures; and even he who has stupified in drunken excesses, not his intellectual faculties only, but almost the very feelings that render him a moral being, finds the madness of the maddest drunkenness a more animating pleasure, when shared with some wretched half-human maniac like himself. Even the passions that are absolutely malignant, and that, in separating their victim from the kind offices, and from the common courtesies of life, seem to break the very bond of social affinity, still bring the feelings, the thoughts, the emotions of living beings, as objects ever present to the mind, and thus connect man, in some measure, with man, even on appearing to throw them off with violence from each other. He who hates must at least have man before him, and must feel some common tie that connects him with the very object of his hate. But to the miser there is no tie of human feeling. There are no propinquities to him, no friendships; but the place of these is supplied, and fully supplied, by the single passion which occupies his heart. It is not man, but a mass of inanimate matter, which is ever before his mind, and almost ever before his very eyes, or at least which would be almost ever before his eyes, if there were no fear of exposing, as booty, what would otherwise be the delight of his unceasing contemplation. He thinks, indeed, and toils; but he thinks only of gold, toils only for gold; and if his gold could be doubled by the annihilation of all beside, he would care little, perhaps, though no other object were to exist, but the mass which he has to measure or compute, and himself the sole happy measurer or computer of it. In his very nature, indeed, he becomes himself almost as little human, as that which he adores. Where his gold is buried, his affections, too, are buried. The figure which Salvian uses, in speaking of this moral torpor of the miser, is scarcely too bold a one, that his soul assimilates itself to his treasure, and is transmuted, as it were, into a mere earthly mass. "Mens thesaurizontis thesaurum suum sequitur, et quasi, in naturam terrestris substantiæ demutatur." Even if this moral torpor to every kind affection were all, the passion of the miser, contemptible as it might seem, would still be only an object of contempt, or of a mixture of disgust and pity. But with how many positive vices is avarice connected-and how difficult is it for him, who values the possession of wealth as far transcending every thing beside, to respect, in any of its forms, when it is opposed to his unjust gain, the restraint of that moral |