t is assigned; and he
will have no leisure to regret yesterday's vexations who resolves not to
have a new subject of regret to-morrow.

But to forget or to remember at pleasure, are equally beyond the power
of man. Yet as memory may be assisted by method, and the decays of
knowledge repaired by stated times of recollection, so the power of
forgetting is capable of improvement. Reason will, by a resolute
contest, prevail over imagination, and the power may be obtained of
transferring the attention as judgment shall direct.

The incursions of troublesome thoughts are often violent and
importunate; and it is not easy to a mind accustomed to their inroads to
expel them immediately by putting better images into motion; but this
enemy of quiet is above all others weakened by every defeat; the
reflection which has been once overpowered and ejected, seldom returns
with any formidable vehemence.

Employment is the great instrument of intellectual dominion. The mind
cannot retire from its enemy into total vacancy, or turn aside from one
object but by passing to another. The gloomy and the resentful are
always found among those who have nothing to do, or who do nothing. We
must be busy about good or evil, and he to whom the present offers
nothing will often be looking backward on the past.

No. 73. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1759.

That every man would be rich if a wish could obtain riches, is a
position which I believe few will contest, at least in a nation like
ours, in which commerce has kindled an universal emulation of wealth,
and in which money receives all the honours which are the proper right
of knowledge and of virtue.

Yet, though we are all labouring for gold as for the chief good, and, by
the natural effort of unwearied diligence, have found many expeditious
methods of obtaining it, we have not been able to improve the art of
using it, or to make it produce more happiness than it afforded in
former times, when every declaimer expatiated on its mischiefs, and
every philosopher taught his followers to despise it.

Many of the dangers imputed of old to exorbitant wealth, are now at an
end. The rich are neither waylaid by robbers, nor watched by informers;
there is nothing to be dreaded from proscriptions, or seizures. The
necessity of concealing treasure has long ceased; no man now needs
counterfeit mediocrity, and condemn his plate and jewels to caverns and
darkness, or feast his mind with the consciousness o