hat we shrink from their
remembrance, dread their intrusion upon our minds, and fly from them as
from enemies that pursue us with torture.

No man past the middle point of life can sit down to feast upon the
pleasures of youth without finding the banquet embittered by the cup of
sorrow; he may revive lucky accidents, and pleasing extravagancies; many
days of harmless frolick, or nights of honest festivity, will perhaps
recur; or, if he has been engaged in scenes of action, and acquainted
with affairs of difficulty and vicissitudes of fortune, he may enjoy the
nobler pleasure of looking back upon distress firmly supported, dangers
resolutely encountered, and opposition artfully defeated. Aeneas
properly comforts his companions, when, after the horrours of a storm,
they have landed on an unknown and desolate country, with the hope that
their miseries will be at some distant time recounted with delight.
There are few higher gratifications, than that of reflection on
surmounted evils, when they are not incurred nor protracted by our
fault, and neither reproach us with cowardice nor guilt.

But this felicity is almost always abated by the reflection that they
with whom we should be most pleased to share it are now in the grave. A
few years make such havock in human generations, that we soon see
ourselves deprived of those with whom we entered the world, and whom the
participation of pleasures or fatigues had endeared to our remembrance.
The man of enterprise recounts his adventures and expedients, but is
forced, at the close of the relation, to pay a sigh to the names of
those that contributed to his success; he that passes his life among the
gayer part of mankind, has his remembrance stored with remarks and
repartees of wits, whose sprightliness and merriment are now lost in
perpetual silence; the trader, whose industry has supplied the want of
inheritance, repines in solitary plenty at the absence of companions,
with whom he had planned out amusements for his latter years; and the
scholar, whose merit, after a long series of efforts, raises him from
obscurity, looks round in vain from his exaltation for his old friends
or enemies, whose applause or mortification would heighten his triumph.

Among Martial's requisites to happiness is, _Res non parta labore, sed
relicta_, "an estate not gained by industry, but left by inheritance."
It is necessary to the completion of every good, that it be timely
obtained; for whatever co