.

In our youthful days, we all remember to have read a pithy string of
Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence
of their wit,--but here their influence too often terminates. Since
Franklin's time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and
more easy, notwithstanding men have become more wary. Goldsmith, too,
gives us a true picture of this habit in his scene with Mr. Padusoy, the
mercer, a mode which has been found to succeed so well since his time,
that, with the exception of a few short-cuts by sharpers and other
proscribed gentry, little amendment has been made. Profuseness on the
part of the debtor will generally be found to beget confidence on that
of the creditor; and, in like manner, diffidence will create mistrust,
and mistrust an entire overthrow of the scheme. An unblushing front, and
the gift of _non chalance_, are therefore the best qualifications
for a debtor to obtain credit, while poor modesty will be starved in her
own littleness. In vain has Juvenal protested--"_Fronti nulla
fides;_" and have the world been amused with anecdotes of paupers
dying with money sewed up in their clothes: appearance and assumed
habits are still the handmaids to confidence; and so long as this system
exists, the warfare of debtor and creditor will be continued.
Procrastination will be found to be another furtherance of the system,
inasmuch as it is too evident throughout life that men are more apt to
take pleasure "by the forelock," than to calculate its consequence. In
this manner, men of irregular habits anticipate and forestal every hour
of their lives, and pleasure and pain alternate, till pain, like debt,
accumulates, and sinks its patient below the level of the world. Economy
and forecast do not enter into the composition of such men, nor are such
lessons often felt or acknowledged, till custom has rendered the heart
unfit for the reception of their counsels. It is too frequently that the
neglect of these principles strikes at the root of social happiness, and
produces those lamentable wrecks of men--those shadows of sovereignty,
which people our prisons, poor-houses, and asylums. Genius, with all her
book-knowledge, is not exempt from this failing; but, on the contrary, a
sort of fatality seems to attend her sons and daughters, which tarnishes
their fame, and often exposes them to the brutish attacks of the
ignorant and vulgar. Wits, and even philosophers, are among this number;