smallest enjoyments, than those who possess them
are usually blessed with. The want of taste and genius, with all the
pleasures that arise from them, are commonly recompensed by a more
useful kind of common sense, together with a wonderful delight, as well
as success, in the busy pursuits of a scrambling world. The sufferings
of the sick are greatly relieved by many trifling gratifications,
imperceptible to others, and, sometimes, almost repaid by the
inconceivable transports occasioned by the return of health and vigour.
Folly cannot be very grievous, because imperceptible; and I doubt not
but there is some truth in that rant of a mad poet, that there is a
pleasure in being mad, which none but madmen know. Ignorance, or the
want of knowledge and literature, the appointed lot of all born to
poverty and the drudgeries of life, is the only opiate capable of
infusing that insensibility, which can enable them to endure the
miseries of the one, and the fatigues of the other. It is a cordial,
administered by the gracious hand of providence, of which they ought
never to be deprived by an ill-judged and improper education. It is the
basis of all subordination, the support of society, and the privilege of
individuals; and I have ever thought it a most remarkable instance of
the divine wisdom, that, whereas in all animals, whose individuals rise
little above the rest of their species, knowledge is instinctive; in
man, whose individuals are so widely different, it is acquired by
education; by which means the prince and the labourer, the philosopher
and the peasant, are, in some measure, fitted for their respective
situations."

Much of these positions is, perhaps, true; and the whole paragraph might
well pass without censure, were not objections necessary to the
establishment of knowledge. Poverty is very gently paraphrased by want
of riches. In that sense, almost every man may, in his own opinion, be
poor. But there is another poverty, which is want of competence of all
that can soften the miseries of life, of all that can diversify
attention, or delight imagination. There is yet another poverty, which
is want of necessaries, a species of poverty which no care of the
publick, no charity of particulars, can preserve many from feeling
openly, and many secretly.

That hope and fear are inseparably, or very frequently, connected with
poverty and riches, my surveys of life have not informed me. The milder
degrees of poverty are, so