in upon their morals, and load their
consciences with the reproaches of it for all their lives after.

I remember I knew a tradesman, who, labouring long under the ordinary
difficulties of men embarrassed in trade, and past the possibility of
getting out, and being at last obliged to stop and call his people
together, told me, that after he was broke, though it was a terrible
thing to him at first too, as it is to most tradesmen, yet he thought
himself in a new world, when he was at a full stop, and had no more the
terror upon him of bills coming for payment, and creditors knocking at
his door to dun him, and he without money to pay. He was no more obliged
to stand in his shop, and be bullied and ruffled by his creditors, nay,
by their apprentices and boys, and sometimes by porters and footmen, to
whom he was forced to give good words, and sometimes strain his
patience to the utmost limits: he was now no more obliged to make
promises, which he knew he could not perform, and break promises as fast
as he made them, and so lie continually both to God and man; and, he
added, the ease of his mind which he felt upon that occasion was so
great, that it balanced all the grief he was in at the general disaster
of his affairs; and, farther, that even in the lowest of his
circumstances which followed, he would not go back to live as he had
done, in the exquisite torture of want of money to pay his bills and his
duns.

Nor was it any satisfaction to him to say, that it was owing to the like
breach of promise in the shopkeepers, and gentlemen, and people whom he
dealt with, who owed him money, and who made no conscience of promising
and disappointing him, and thereby drove him to the necessity of
breaking his own promises; for this did not satisfy his mind in the
breaches of his word, though they really drove him to the necessity of
it: but that which lay heaviest upon him was the violence and clamour of
creditors, who would not be satisfied without such promises, even when
he knew, or at least believed, he should not be able to perform.

Nay, such was the importunity of one of his merchants, that when he came
for money, and he was obliged to put him off, and to set him another
day, the merchant would not be satisfied, unless he would swear that he
would pay him on that day without fail. 'And what said you to him?' said
I. 'Say to him!' said he, 'I looked him full in the face, and sat me
down without speaking a word, being filled