would leave every
thing as he finds it, and pass through the world distinguished only by
inoffensive gentleness. But the ministers of luxury have marked him out
as one at whose expense they may exercise their arts. A companion, who
had just learned the names of the Italian masters, runs from sale to
sale, and buys pictures, for which Mr. Tranquil pays, without inquiring
where they shall be hung. Another fills his garden with statues, which
Tranquil wishes away, but dares not remove. One of his friends is
learning architecture by building him a house, which he passed by, and
inquired to whom it belonged; another has been for three years digging
canals and raising mounts, cutting trees down in one place, and planting
them in another, on which Tranquil looks with a serene indifference,
without asking what will be the cost. Another projector tells him that a
waterwork, like that of Versailles, will complete the beauties of his
seat, and lays his draughts before him: Tranquil turns his eyes upon
them, and the artist begins his explanations; Tranquil raises no
objections, but orders him to begin the work, that he may escape from
talk which he does not understand.

Thus a thousand hands are busy at his expense, without adding to his
pleasures. He pays and receives visits, and has loitered in publick or
in solitude, talking in summer of the town, and in winter of the
country, without knowing that his fortune is impaired, till his steward
told him this morning, that he could pay the workmen no longer but by
mortgaging a manor.

No. 74. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 15, 1759.

In the mythological pedigree of learning, memory is made the mother of
the muses, by which the masters of ancient wisdom, perhaps, meant to
show the necessity of storing the mind copiously with true notions,
before the imagination should be suffered to form fictions or collect
embellishments; for the works of an ignorant poet can afford nothing
higher than pleasing sound, and fiction is of no other use than to
display the treasures of memory.

The necessity of memory to the acquisition of knowledge is inevitably
felt and universally allowed, so that scarcely any other of the mental
faculties are commonly considered as necessary to a student: he that
admires the proficiency of another, always attributes it to the
happiness of his memory; and he that laments his own defects, concludes
with a wish that his memory was better.

It is evident, that when the pow