If the taste for
pleasure diminishes, the necessity for comfort increases. Men become
more dependent and more fastidious, and hardships that are indifferent
to youth become acutely painful. Beside this, money cares are apt to
weigh with an especial heaviness upon the old. Avarice, as has been
often observed, is eminently an old-age vice, and in natures that are in
no degree avaricious it will be found that real money anxieties are more
felt and have a greater haunting power in age than in youth. There is
then the sense of impotence which makes men feel that their earning
power has gone. On the other hand youth, and especially early married
life spent under the pressure of narrow circumstances, will often be
looked back upon as both the happiest and the most fruitful period of
life. It is the best discipline of character. It is under such
circumstances that men acquire habits of hard and steady work,
frugality, order, forethought, punctuality, and simplicity of tastes.
They acquire sympathies and realisations they would never have known in
more prosperous circumstances. They learn to take keen pleasure in
little things, and to value rightly both money and time. If wealth and
luxury afterwards come in overflowing measure, these lessons will not be
wholly lost.

The value of money as an element of happiness diminishes rapidly in
proportion to its amount. In the case of the humbler fortunes, each
accession brings with it a large increase of pleasure and comfort, and
probably a very considerable addition to real happiness. In the case of
rich men this is not the case, and of colossal fortunes only a very
small fraction can be truly said to minister to the personal enjoyment
of the owner. The disproportion in the world between pleasure and cost
is indeed almost ludicrous. The two or three shillings that gave us our
first Shakespeare would go but a small way towards providing one of the
perhaps untasted dishes on the dessert table. The choicest masterpieces
of the human mind--the works of human genius that through the long
course of centuries have done most to ennoble, console, brighten, and
direct the lives of men, might all be purchased--I do not say by the
cost of a lady's necklace, but by that of one or two of the little
stones of which it is composed. Compare the relish with which the tired
pedestrian eats his bread and cheese with the appetites with which men
sit down to some stately banquet; compare the level of spirit