ject: he asked me what reasons more than a mere
wandering inclination I had for leaving my 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 for 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 consequences of being born to great things, and wish 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 just standard
of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty nor riches.

He bid 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 and uneasinesses, either of body or
mind, as those were, who by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances,
on one hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and mean or
insufficient diet, on the other hand, bring distempers upon themselves
by the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle
station of life was calculated for all kind of virtues and all kind of
enjoyments; that peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle
fortune; that temperance, moderation, quietness, health, society, all
agreeable diversions, and all desirable pleasures, were the blessings
attending the middle station of life; that this way men went silently
and smoothly through the world, and comfor