the object of this paper--and the question should be an
interesting one, considering how much it is talked about--to inquire
briefly where it lies.

It is quite extraordinary how very various are the opinions entertained
on this point, and, before sifting them, one must be careful in the
first place to eliminate from our inquiry the cases of that considerable
class of persons who pinch themselves. For, however severely they do it,
they may stop when they like and the pain is cured. There is all the
difference in the world between pulling one's own tooth out, and even
the best and kindest of dentists doing it for one. How gingerly one goes
to work, and how often it strikes one that the tooth is a good tooth,
that it has been a fast friend to us for ever so many years and never
'fallen out' before, and that after all it had better stop where it is!

To the truly benevolent mind, indeed, nothing is more satisfactory than
to hear of a miser denying himself the necessaries of life a little too
far and ridding us of his presence altogether. Our confidence in the
average virtue of humanity assures us that his place will be supplied by
a better man. The details of his penurious habits, the comfortless room,
the scanty bedding, the cheese-rinds on his table, and the fat
banking-book under his thin bolster, only inspire disgust: if he were
pinched to death he did it himself, and so much the better for the world
in general and his heir in particular.

Again, the people who have a thousand a year, and who try to persuade
the world that they have two thousand, suffer a good deal of
inconvenience, but it can't be called the pinch of poverty. They may put
limits to their washing-bills, which persons of cleanlier habits would
consider unpleasantly narrow; they may eat cold mutton in private for
five days a week in order to eat turtle and venison in public (and with
the air of eating them every day) on the sixth; and they may immure
themselves in their back rooms in London throughout the autumn in order
to persuade folks that they are still at Trouville, where for ten days
they did really reside and in splendour; but all their stint and
self-incarceration, so far from awakening pity, only fill us with
contempt. I am afraid that even the complaining tones of our City friend
who tells us that in consequence of 'the present unsettled state of the
markets' he has been obliged to make 'great retrenchments'--which it
seems on inquiry consis