e festivity; but he must not
be surprised or indignant that some inquiry should be made as to the
resulting condition of the epicier de Benavente.

And it is all the more necessary that such inquiry be instituted when
the captain of the expedition is a minion, not of the moon, but of the
sun; and dazzling, therefore, to all beholders. "It is heaven which
dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion,"[115] says Henry of
Navarre; "my retreat out of this city,[116] before I have made myself
master of it, will be the retreat of my soul out of my body."
"Accordingly all the quarter which still held out, we forced," says M.
de Rosny, "after which the inhabitants, finding themselves no longer
able to resist, laid down their arms, and the city was given up to
plunder. My good fortune threw a small iron chest in my way, in which I
found about four thousand gold crowns."

I cannot doubt that the Baron's expenditure of this sum would be in the
highest degree advantageous to France and to the Protestant religion.
But complete economical science must study the effect of its abstraction
on the immediate prosperity of the town of Cahors; and even beyond
this--the mode of its former acquisition by the town itself, which
perhaps, in the economies of the nether world, may have delegated some
of its citizens to the seventh circle.[117]

137. And the most curious points in the partiality of modern economical
science are that while it always waives this question of ways and means
with respect to rich persons, it studiously pushes it in the case of
poor ones; and while it asserts the consumption of such an article of
luxury as wine (to take that which Mr. Greg himself instances) to be
economically expedient, when the wine is drunk by persons who are not
thirsty, it asserts the same consumption to be altogether inexpedient,
when the privilege is extended to those who are. Thus Mr. Greg
dismisses, in one place, with compassionate disdain, the extremely
vulgar notion "that a man who drinks a bottle of champagne worth five
shillings, while his neighbor is in want of actual food, is in some way
wronging his neighbor"; and yet Mr. Greg himself, elsewhere,[118]
evidently remains under the equally vulgar impression that the
twenty-four millions of such thirstier persons who spend fifteen per
cent of their incomes in drink and tobacco, are wronging their neighbors
by that expenditure.

138. It cannot, surely, be the difference in degree of refi