that which depends upon the goods of fortune; yet even this is often
fictitious. There is in the world more poverty than is generally
imagined; not only because many whose possessions are large have desires
still larger, and many measure their wants by the gratifications which
others enjoy; but great numbers are pressed by real necessities which it
is their chief ambition to conceal, and are forced to purchase the
appearance of competence and cheerfulness at the expense of many
comforts and conveniencies of life.

Many, however, are confessedly rich, and many more are sufficiently
removed from all danger of real poverty: but it has been long ago
remarked, that money cannot purchase quiet; the highest of mankind can
promise themselves no exemption from that discord or suspicion, by which
the sweetness of domestick retirement is destroyed; and must always be
even more exposed, in the same degree as they are elevated above others,
to the treachery of dependants, the calumny of defamers and the violence
of opponents.

Affliction is inseparable from our present state: it adheres to all the
inhabitants of this world, in different proportions indeed, but with an
allotment which seems very little regulated by our own conduct. It has
been the boast of some swelling moralists, that every man's fortune was
in his own power, that prudence supplied the place of all other
divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue.
But, surely, the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows, against
which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been
boasted, is held up in vain: we do not always suffer by our crimes; we
are not always protected by our innocence.

A good man is by no means exempt from the danger of suffering by the
crimes of others; even his goodness may raise him enemies of implacable
malice and restless perseverance: the good man has never been warranted
by Heaven from the treachery of friends, the disobedience of children or
the dishonesty of a wife; he may see his cares made useless by
profusion, his instructions defeated by perverseness, and his kindness
rejected by ingratitude; he may languish under the infamy of false
accusations, or perish reproachfully by an unjust sentence.

A good man is subject, like other mortals, to all the influences of
natural evil; his harvest is not spared by the tempest, nor his cattle
by the murrain; his house flames like others in a conflagration; nor
h