back upon; they have no taste
for books; sometimes they can scarcely write their own names. They have
nothing to think of but money,--and of what will make money. They have
no faith, but in riches! They keep their children under restriction and
bring them up with a servile education.

At length, an accumulation of money comes into the children's hands.
They have before been restricted in their expenditure; now they become
lavish. They have been educated in no better tastes. They spend
extravagantly. They will not be drudges in business as their father was.
They will be "gentlemen," and spend their money "like gentlemen." And
very soon the money takes wings and flies away. Many are the instances
in which families have been raised to wealth in the first generation,
launched into ruinous expense in the second, and disappeared in the
third,--being again reduced to poverty. Hence the Lancashire proverb,
"Twice clogs, once boots." The first man wore clogs, and accumulated a
"a power o' money;" his rich son spent it; and the third generation took
up the clogs again. A candidate for parliamentary honours, when speaking
from the hustings, was asked if he had plenty brass. "Plenty brass?"
said he; "ay, I've lots o' brass!--I stink o' brass!"

The same social transformations are known in Scotland. The proverb there
is, "The grandsire digs, the father bigs, the son thigs,"[1]--that is,
the grandfather worked hard and made a fortune, the father built a fine
house, and the son, "an unthrifty son of Linne," when land and goods
were gone and spent, took to thieving. Merchants are sometimes princes
to-day and beggars to-morrow; and so long as the genius for speculation
is exercised by a mercantile family, the talent which gave them landed
property may eventually deprive them of it.

[Footnote 1: _Dublin University Magazine_.]

To be happy in old age--at a time when men should leave for ever the
toil, anxiety, and worry of money-making--they must, during youth and
middle life, have kept their minds healthily active. They must
familiarize themselves with knowledge, and take an interest in all that
has been done, and is doing, to make the world wiser and better from age
to age. There is enough leisure in most men's lives to enable them to
interest themselves in biography and history. They may also acquire
considerable knowledge of science, or of some ennobling pursuit
different from that by which money is made. Mere amusement will not