alf the
city and beats Alderman ----- hollow, is a smile reflected from heaps
of unsunned gold! Nature and Fortune are not so much at variance as to
differ about this fellow. To enjoy the good the Gods provide us is to
deserve it. Nature meant him for a Knight, Alderman, and City Member;
and Fortune laughed to see the goodly person and prospects of the
man!(2) I am not, from certain early prejudices, much to admire the
ostentatious marks of wealth (there are persons enough to admire them
without me)--but I confess, there is something in the look of the old
banking-houses in Lombard Street, the posterns covered with mud, the
doors opening sullenly and silently, the absence of all pretence, the
darkness and the gloom within, the gleaming of lamps in the day-time,

Like a faint shadow of uncertain light,

that almost realises the poetical conception of the cave of Mammon in
Spenser, where dust and cobwebs concealed the roofs and pillars of solid
gold, and lifts the mind quite off its ordinary hinges. The account
of the manner in which the founder of Guy's Hospital accumulated his
immense wealth has always to me something romantic in it, from the same
force of contrast. He was a little shop-keeper, and out of his savings
bought Bibles and purchased seamen's tickets in Queen Anne's wars,
by which he left a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds. The story
suggests the idea of a magician; nor is there anything in the _Arabian
Nights_ that looks more like a fiction.

NOTES to ESSAY XI

(1) When Buonaparte left the Chamber of Deputies to go and fight his
last fatal battle, he advised them not to be debating the forms of
Constitutions when the enemy was at their gates. Benjamin Constant
thought otherwise. He wanted to play a game at _cat's-cradle_ between
the Republicans and Royalists, and lost his match. He did not care, so
that he hampered a more efficient man than himself.

(2) A thorough fitness for any end implies the means. Where there is a
will, there is a way. A real passion, an entire devotion to any object,
always succeeds. The strong sympathy with what we wish and imagine
realises it, dissipates all obstacles, and removes all scruples. The
disappointed lover may complain as much as he pleases. He was himself to
blame. He was a half-witted, _wishy-washy_ fellow. His love might be as
great as he makes it out; but it was not his ruling passion. His fear,
his pride, his vanity was greater. Let any one's whole