learning, as far as
house-education and a country free school generally go, and designed me
for the law; but I would be satisfied with nothing but going to sea; and
my inclination to this led me so strongly against the will, nay, the
commands of my father, and against all the entreaties and persuasions of
my mother and other friends, that there seemed to be something fatal in
that propensity of nature, tending directly to the life of misery which
was to befall me.

My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel
against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his
chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly
with me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere
wandering inclination, I had for leaving father's house and my native
country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising
my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure.
He told me it was men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring,
superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise
by enterprise, and make themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out
of the common road; that these things were all either too far above me or
too far below me; that mine was the middle state, or what might be called
the upper station of low life, which he had found, by long experience,
was the best state in the world, the most suited to human happiness, not
exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the
mechanic part of mankind, and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury,
ambition, and envy of the upper part of mankind. He told me I might
judge of the happiness of this state by this one thing--viz. that this
was the state of life which all other people envied; that kings have
frequently lamented the miserable consequence of being born to great
things, and wished they had been placed in the middle of the two
extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise man gave his
testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to have
neither poverty nor riches.

He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of
life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the
middle station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many
vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not
subjected to so many distempers