time, but we blunt our natural interest in things.
That interest you preserve in all its virgin force, and this force
carries a man far. Then, again, although the opportunities of rich
people are very superior to yours, they are not altogether so superior
as they seem. There exists a great equalizing power, the limitation of
human energy. A rich man may sit down to an enormous banquet, but he can
only make a good use of the little that he is able to digest. So it is
with the splendid intellectual banquet that is spread before the rich
man's eyes. He can only possess what he has energy to master, and too
frequently the manifest impossibility of mastering everything produces a
feeling of discouragement that ends in his mastering nothing. A poor
student, especially if he lives in an out-of-the-way place where there
are no big libraries to bewilder him, may apply his energy with effect
in the study of a few authors.

I used to believe a great deal more in opportunities and less in
application than I do now. Time and health are needed, but with these
there are always opportunities. Rich people have a fancy for spending
money very uselessly on their culture because it seems to them more
valuable when it has been costly; but the truth is, that by the blessing
of good and cheap literature, intellectual light has become almost as
accessible as daylight. I have a rich friend who travels more, and buys
more costly things, than I do, but he does not really learn more or
advance farther in the twelvemonth. If my days are fully occupied, what
has he to set against them? only other well-occupied days, no more. If
he is getting benefit at St. Petersburg he is missing the benefit I am
getting round my house, and in it. The sum of the year's benefit seems
to be surprisingly alike in both cases. So if you are reading a piece of
thoroughly good literature, Baron Rothschild may possibly be as well
occupied as you--he is certainly not better occupied. When I open a
noble volume I say to myself, "Now the only Croesus that I envy is he
who is reading a better book than this."

FOOTNOTES:

[4] This sounds like a poetical exaggeration, but it is less than the
bare truth. There were fifteen hundred slaves on two West Indian
estates that Beckford lost in a lawsuit. It is quite certain,
considering his lavish expenditure, that fully a thousand men must
have worked for the maintenance of his luxury in Europe. So much for
h