s at the
village dance with that of the great city ball whose lavish splendour
fills the society papers with admiration; compare the charm of
conversation in the college common room with the weary faces that may be
often seen around the millionaire's dinner table,--and we may gain a
good lesson of the vanity of riches. The transition from want to comfort
brings with it keen enjoyment and much lasting happiness. The transition
from mere comfort to luxury brings incomparably less and costs
incomparably more. Let a man of enormous wealth analyse his life from
day to day and try to estimate what are the things or hours that have
afforded him real and vivid pleasure. In many cases he will probably say
that he has found it in his work--in others in the hour spent with his
cigar, his newspaper, or his book, or in his game of cricket, or in the
excitement of the hunting-field, or in his conversation with an old
friend, or in hearing his daughters sing, or in welcoming his son on his
return from school. Let him look round the splendid adornments of his
home and ask how many of these things have ever given him a pleasure at
all proportionate to their cost. Probably in many cases, if he deals
honestly with himself, he would confess that his armchair and his
bookshelves are almost the only exceptions.

Steam, the printing press, the spread of education, and the great
multiplication of public libraries, museums, picture galleries and
exhibitions have brought the chief pleasures of life in a much larger
degree than in any previous age within the reach of what are called the
working classes, while in the conditions of modern life nearly all the
great sources of real enjoyment that money can give are open to a man
who possesses a competent but not extraordinary fortune and some
leisure. Intellectual tastes he may gratify to the full. Books, at all
events in the great centres of civilisation, are accessible far in
excess of his powers of reading. The pleasures of the theatre, the
pleasures of society, the pleasures of music in most of its forms, the
pleasures of travel with all its variety of interests, and many of the
pleasures of sport, are abundantly at his disposal. The possession of
the highest works of art has no doubt become more and more a monopoly of
the very rich, but picture galleries and exhibitions and the facilities
of travel have diffused the knowledge and enjoyment of art over a vastly
wider area than in the past. The po