Wealth for its power do we honour and adore ?
The things we hate, ill fate, and death, have more.

4.

From towns and courts, camps of the rich and great,
I retreat,

The vaft Xerxean army,

And to the fmall Laconic forces fly [r],
Which hold the ftraights of poverty.
Cellars and granaries in vain we fill,

With all the bounteous fummer's store,
If the mind thirst and hunger ftill:

The poor rich man's emphatically poor []. Slaves to the things, we too much prize, We mafters grow of all that we despise.

5.

A field of corn, a fountain and a wood,
Is all the wealth by nature understood.

thunder-ftorms. This danger, transferred to the poet's head, called for the Mufes lawrel, to fecure him from the lightning's force: which, again (and that brought him round to the point, from which he had fet out), being fatal, chiefly, to high and eminent fituations, admonished him not to lift his head [tollere verticem] into the way of that violent meteor.

"Such tricks hath ftrong imagination!"

[r] Xerxean army. Laconic forces-] A forced unnatural allufion, for the fake of introducing a quibble-the ftraights of poverty: the word, ftraights, meaning a narrow pass, like that of THERMOPYLE, which the fmall Laconic forces guarded against the vaft Xerxean army; and diftreffes, or difficulties, fuch as men are put to, when they have to contend with

POVERTY.

[s] The poor rich man's emphatically poor] We had this line above, p. 159. It feems to have been a favourite with the poet; as it is, indeed, a very fine one.

The

د

The monarch, on whom fertile Nile bestows
All which that grateful earth can bear,
Deceives himself, if he suppose
That more than this falls to his share.
Whatever an estate does beyond this afford,
Is not a rent paid to the lord;
But is a tax illegal and unjust,
Exacted from it by the tyrant luft.

Much will always wanting be,

To him who much defires. Thrice happy he
To whom the wife indulgency of heaven,
With fparing hand, but just enough has given.

VIII The

VIII.

The Dangers of an Honeft Man in much Company.

I

F twenty thousand [] naked Americans were

not able to refift the affaults of but twenty well-armed Spaniards, I fee little poffibility for one honest man to defend himself against twenty thousand knaves, who are all furnished cap-à pié, with the defenfive arms of worldly prudence, and the offenfive too of craft and malice. will find no lefs odds than this against him, if he have much to do in human affairs. The only advice therefore which I can give him is, to be fure not to venture his perfon any longer in

He

[t] If twenty thousand] There are fome very dark fhades in the following picture of human life, or rather of the age in which the writer lived; which is not much to be wondered at, if that age be truly characterized by one, who had great experience of it "Dark fhades become the portrait of our time; "Here weeps Misfortune, and here triumphs Crime." Waller.

-Or, the true account of the matter may be only this: Virtue is, always, a little of a mifanthrope; and the pure virtue of Mr. Cowley, clouded by chagrin, and, perhaps, a conftitutional melancholy, could fcarce fail of taking fomewhat too much of that character. Yet his good fenfe and good temper have generally kept him from any extravagance in the expreffion of it, except, perhaps in this chapter.

the

the open campaign, to retreat and entrench himself, to stop up all avenues, and draw up all bridges against so numerous an enemy.

The truth of it is, that a man in much bufinefs muft either make himself a knave, or else the world will make him a fool: and, if the injury went no farther than the being laught at, a wife man would content himself with the revenge of retaliation; but the cafe is much worse, for these civil cannibals too, as well as the wild ones, not only dance about such a taken ftranger [u], but at laft devour him. A fober man cannot get too foon out of drunken company, though they be never fo kind and merry among themselves; it is not unpleasant only, but dangerous to him.

Do ye wonder that a virtuous man should love to be alone? It is hard for him to be otherwife; he is fo, when he is among ten thousand: neither is the folitude fo uncomfortable to be alone without any other creature, as it is to be alone, in the midst of wild beafts. Man is to man all kind of beafts, a fawning dog, a roaring lion, a thieving fox, a robbing wolf, a dissembling crocodile, a treacherous decoy, and a rapacious vulture. The civileft, methinks, of

[u] -a taken ftranger] Taken, in the double sense of feized, and circumvented; that is, furprized by force, or fraud-Captus, in Latin, has the fame ambiguity.

VOL. II.

I

all

all nations, are thofe, whom we account the moft barbarous; there is fome moderation and good-nature in the Toupinambaltians, who eat no men but their enemies, whilft we learned and polite and Christian Europeans, like so many pikes and sharks, prey upon every thing that we can swallow. It is the great boast of eloquence and philofophy, that they first congregated men difperfed, united them into focieties, and built up the houses and the walls of cities. I wish, they could unravel all they had woven; that we might have our woods and our innocence again, instead of our caftles and our policies. They have affembled many thousands of scattered people into one body: it is true, they have done fo, they have brought them together into cities to cozen, and into armies to murder one another they found them hunters and fifhers of wild creatures; they have made them hunters and fishers of their brethren; they boast to have reduced them to a ftate of peace, when the truth is, they have only taught them an art of war; they have framed, I must confefs, wholefome laws for the refraint of vice, but they raised first that devil, which now they conjure and cannot bind; though there were before no punishments for wickedness, yet there was lefs committed, becaufe there were no rewards for it.

But the men, who praife philofophy from this topic, are much deceived; let oratory anfwer for itfelf, the tinkling perhaps of that may

unite