LETTER 104. To JOSIAH WADE
March 6, 1801.
My very dear friend,
I have even now received your letter. My habits of thinking and feeling,
have not hitherto inclined me to personify commerce in any such shape,
so as to tempt me to turn pagan, and offer vows to the goddess of our
isle. But when I read that sentence in your letter, "The time will come
I trust, when I shall be able to pitch my tent in your neighbourhood," I
was most potently commanded [1] to a breach of the second
commandment, and on my knees, to entreat the said goddess to touch your
bank notes and guineas with her magical multiplying wand. I could offer
such a prayer for you, with a better conscience than for most men,
because I know that you have never lost that healthy common sense, which
regards money only as the means of independence, and that you would
sooner than most men cry out, enough! enough! To see one's children
secured against want, is doubtless a delightful thing; but to wish to
see them begin the world as rich men, is unwise to ourselves, for it
permits no close of our labours, and is pernicious to them; for it
leaves no motive to their exertions, none of those sympathies with the
industrious and the poor, which form at once the true relish and proper
antidote of wealth.
* * * Is not March rather a perilous month for the voyage from
Yarmouth to Hamburg? Danger there is very little, in the packets, but I
know what inconvenience rough weather brings with it; not from my own
feelings, for I am never sea-sick, but always in exceeding high spirits
on board ship, but from what I see in others.
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