ays that to be rich is no relief, but only an alteration, of
affairs. In truth, it is not want, but rather abundance, that creates
avarice. I will deliver my own experience concerning this affair.

I have since my emergence from childhood lived in three sorts of
conditions. The first, which continued for some twenty years, I passed
over without any other means but what were casual and depending upon the
allowance and assistance of others, without stint, but without certain
revenue. I then spent my money so much the more cheerfully, and with so
much the less care how it went, as it wholly depended upon my
overconfidence of fortune. I never lived more at my ease; I never had
the repulse of finding the purse of any of my friends shut against me,
having enjoined myself this necessity above all other necessities
whatever, by no means to fail of payment at the appointed time, which
also they have a thousand times respited, seeing how careful I was to
satisfy them; so that I practised at once a thrifty, and withal a kind of
alluring, honesty. I naturally feel a kind of pleasure in paying, as if
I eased my shoulders of a troublesome weight and freed myself from an
image of slavery; as also that I find a ravishing kind of satisfaction in
pleasing another and doing a just action. I except payments where the
trouble of bargaining and reckoning is required; and in such cases; where
I can meet with nobody to ease me of that charge, I delay them, how
scandalously and injuriously soever, all I possibly can, for fear of the
wranglings for which both my humour and way of speaking are so totally
improper and unfit. There is nothing I hate so much as driving a
bargain; 'tis a mere traffic of cozenage and impudence, where, after an
hour's cheapening and hesitating, both parties abandon their word and
oath for five sols' abatement. Yet I always borrowed at great
disadvantage; for, wanting the confidence to speak to the person myself,
I committed my request to the persuasion of a letter, which usually is no
very successful advocate, and is of very great advantage to him who has a
mind to deny. I, in those days, more jocundly and freely referred the
conduct of my affairs to the stars, than I have since done to my own
providence and judgment. Most good managers look upon it as a horrible
thing to live always thus in uncertainty, and do not consider, in the
first place, that the greatest part of the world live so: how many worthy
men