nce,
heedless and ignorant as it is, does me great service in my domestic
affairs; I employ myself in them, but it goes against the hair, finding
that I have this in my house, that though I burn my candle at one end by
myself, the other is not spared.

Journeys do me no harm but only by their expense, which is great, and
more than I am well able to bear, being always wont to travel with not
only a necessary, but a handsome equipage; I must make them so much
shorter and fewer; I spend therein but the froth, and what I have
reserved for such uses, delaying and deferring my motion till that be
ready. I will not that the pleasure of going abroad spoil the pleasure
of being retired at home; on the contrary, I intend they shall nourish
and favour one another. Fortune has assisted me in this, that since my
principal profession in this life was to live at ease, and rather idly
than busily, she has deprived me of the necessity of growing rich to
provide for the multitude of my heirs. If there be not enough for one,
of that whereof I had so plentifully enough, at his peril be it: his
imprudence will not deserve that I should wish him any more. And every
one, according to the example of Phocion, provides sufficiently for his
children who so provides for them as to leave them as much as was left
him. I should by no means like Crates' way. He left his money in the
hands of a banker with this condition--that if his children were fools,
he should then give it to them; if wise, he should then distribute it to
the most foolish of the people; as if fools, for being less capable of
living without riches, were more capable of using them.

At all events, the damage occasioned by my absence seems not to deserve,
so long as I am able to support it, that I should waive the occasions of
diverting myself by that troublesome assistance.

There is always something that goes amiss. The affairs, one while of one
house, and then of another, tear you to pieces; you pry into everything
too near; your perspicacity hurts you here, as well as in other things.
I steal away from occasions of vexing myself, and turn from the knowledge
of things that go amiss; and yet I cannot so order it, but that every
hour I jostle against something or other that displeases me; and the
tricks that they most conceal from me, are those that I the soonest come
to know; some there are that, not to make matters worse, a man must
himself help to conceal. Vain vexations