University of Virginia Library

MONEY.

“Riches are not happiness,” say many old prosers
generally “well-to-do” in the world—granted; neither
is Poverty directly and absolutely misery; but
if she be not, she is near akin—she is “mother of
miseries,” and has, in truth, as swarming and ill-favored
a progeny, of all shapes and sizes, as can
well be conceived, from full-grown evils down to
small, petty nuisances. As it often happens, the
junior portion of her offspring are the worst to be
endured. They have not the deadly stings and
matured malignancy of the elder evils, but are more
fretful, teazing, irritating, and annoying; and are
that set of imps that are perpetually pestering men

in middling circumstances, or rather, on the borders
or confines thereof, but whom an increasing deficiency
of, and an increasing necessity for, the circulating
medium, is gradually dragging down to
that class of “despisable vagabonds,” as Cooper's
housekeeper calls them—the poor. Be not afraid,
ye men of millions, am not about to make any
drafts upon your sympathy, I am not about to attempt
to draw, a-la-Banim, any fearful, loathsome,
haggard picture of poverty and its effects. Such
pictures do little good, and much harm. They
have the tendency to sere and render callous the
feelings rather than excite pity, or open the
well-springs of divine charity. Besides, the superlative
is not my line; the positive or comparative
is quite high or low enough for one who neither
deals in celestial bliss nor ineffable woe, but am content
to peddle in the small ware of mere human
troubles and inconveniences.

To want money is to want “honor, love, obedience,
troops of friends;” it is to want respect and
sympathy, and the ordinary courtesies of society,
besides, occasionally, victuals. The possession or
non-possession of it makes the difference whether
life has to be an enjoyment or a task; whether it
has to be a walk over a smooth, verdant lawn,
amid fragrant flowers, and aromatic shrubs, and

all things that minister pleasure to the senses; or
a wearisome up-hill journey through thorns and
briars, and other disgracious impediments. It makes
the difference whether you have to go bounding
exultingly along like the free, full-blooded courser,
or wend your way wearily and slow like the laden
and despised pack-horse.

To want money, in a high state of civilization,
is to be a kind of slave; it is, at least, to be dependent
on the whims and caprices of others, instead
of indulging in all the pleasant eccentricities or originalities
to which your temperament may prompt
you; it is to have to rise soon when you wish to lie
late, and go to bed early in order to be enabled so
to do; it is to have to eat indiscriminate provender,
instead of making a judicious selection from the
“delicious juices of meats and fishes;” it is to have
to live in unwholesome and anti-respectable neighborhoods,
and mix in daily communion with people
whose ways are not your ways; it is to be a
drudge, a hack, a machine, worked for the profit
and advantage of others until the springs are
broken; it is to be omitted in family celebrations,
and roam about invitationless at Christmas; it is
to have to put up with equivocal nods and recognitions
in the streets—to have your friends look into
print-shop windows as you approach, and suddenly

bring their admiration of the engraver's skill to a
period as soon as you have passed by; it is to feel
all delicate sensibilities, all free generous feelings, all
ardent and aspiring thoughts checked and crushed
within you by a petty but overbearing necessity; it is
to have to suffer at once the greatest misfortunes and
the most contemptible vexations; to have family
affections and social friendships uprooted and destroyed,
and to be obliged to be uncomfortably careful
of coats, hats, and other habiliments. It is to
live “a man forbid;” or it is to become an exile
from your native land—an outcast, a wanderer in
foreign and unhealthy climes, hunting for the yellow
indispensable, until you are of the color of the
metal you are in quest of; until the temper becomes
soured, the feelings deadened, the heart indurated,
and the liver in an improper state. How beautifully
has Leyden portrayed his own fate and feelings,
and those of thousands of others, in that pure
gem of poetry, the “Address to an Indian Gold
Coin”—
To lack money is to lack a passport or admission
ticket into the pleasant places of God's earth—to
much that is glorious and wonderful in nature, and
nearly all that is rare, and curious, and enchanting,
in art; or if you do travel about in a small way, it
is to have that most miserable, rascally, intrusive,
and disagreeable of all traveling companions—economy,
yoked to you; to be under a continual restraint
from his presence; to feel unable to give
your mind cheerfully and freely up to the scene
before you; and in the contemplation of a magnicent
view, or a piece of hoar antiquity, to have the
wretch whisper in your ear the probable cost of your
pleasurable sensations; it is to have a continual
contest carried on in your sensorium between pleasure
and prudence; it is to submit to small inconveniences
and petty insults at inns for the accommodation
of travelers, where, above all places on
earth, the men of money shine out with the most
resplendent glory, and the unmonied become the
most truly insignificant; it is, in fact, to have all
your enjoyments diminished and annoyances aggravated;
to have pleasure almost transmuted into
pain, or at least, to have “such shadow of vexation”
thrown over it as materially to change its complexion;
and when all is over—journey done and expenses
paid—it is to feel a sort of mean remorse
as you reckon up your past expenditure, and ponder
over the most probable remedial ways and means
for the future.

The two things most difficult of discovery, next
to the passage round the north pole, are talent in
a poor man and dullness in a rich one; therefore,
to want money, is to want wit, humor, eloquence, in
fact capacity of every kind, or, at the best, if they be
not altogether denied, to have such a duty levied
upon them—such an oppressive drawback—that
the rich man with inferior wares, is able to beat the
poor one whenever they come into competition.
For instance, the most casual observer of men and
manners must have noticed that in company a joke
from a man of 5000l. per annum, elicits more admiration,
and produces infinitely more hilarity and
good humor, than ten equally good from a man
worth 500l. Oh! it is perfectly wonderful the
raciness and point that an abundance of temporalities
impart to a rather dull saying. Besides, a jest
from a man in the receipt of a contemptible income,
by some strange fatality invariably changes its nature,
and becomes little better than sheer impertinence.
It is that sort of thing which grave gentlemen
and prudent matrons designate by the word
“unbecoming.” Now all this, though visible to the
meanest capacity, might puzzle a philosopher; he

would be as unable to comprehend it as he would
the curious sympathy which evidently exists between
sterling wit and superfine cloth, that mutually
assist and set off each other. Many a quaint
conceit and rare piece of pleasantry has altogether
lost its effect and fallen pointless in consequence of
the speaker's garments not being of that texture, or
possessed of that freshness which is altogether desirable.
The moral, good reader, to be deduced from
all this is—that you be not petulant and acrimonious
because these things are so, but that, if endowed
with a “money-making disposition,” you
assiduously cultivate it, and then you will not need
care whether these things are so or not.

The want of money too, I am inclined to think,
produces physical changes which have not as yet
been sufficiently noticed by the faculty. It causes
a gradual and considerable accumulation of bile,
which lies lurking in the system, until the incivilities
of friends, or the importunities of creditors,
cause it to become completely vitiated or inspissated;
after which a man, especially one predisposed to
melancholy and contemplation, looks at every thing
on earth through a pair of yellow spectacles. The
unhappy patient becomes saturated, body and mind,
with jaundice; he shuns the society of his fellow
men, buttons his coat up to his chin, pulls his hat

over his eyes, deposits his hands in the pockets of
his small-clothes, and takes extraordinary long
walks into the country. But even the fair face of
nature becomes changed; the barrenness of his
pockets throws a corresponding sterility over the
landscape, deducting “the glory from the grass and
splendor from the flower.” The blossoming of the
earth is no longer pleasant to his sight, or the music
of the merry warblers of the woods delightful to his
ear. His “heart is out of joint,” and all nature
seems to be filled with unpleasing comparisons between
his own state and hers. He stalks about
with lowering brow and upturned lip, an unpleasant
discord amid the universal harmony and fitness of
things. At this juncture, let intelligence arrive of
a heavy legacy left him by some appropriately defunct
distant relative—and lo! the change! It is
as a dark cloud passing from the sun. Monsieur
Il Penseroso becomes L'Allegro in a twinkling. He
draws his hand from the extensive vacuum in which
they have been dangling, takes the yellow spectacles
from his eyes, raises the hat from his brow,
unbuttons his coat, and turns, with a feeling of
leisurely enjoyment, to welcome the fresh spring
breeze. The song of birds and the odour of flowers
are again grateful to his senses. The rivulet tinkles
once more pleasantly in his ear, and the cheerful
song of the lark finds a corresponding echo in
his own bosom. He indulges no longer in speculations
on the vanity and insufficiency of things,
but hies homeward cheerful, free, enfranchised,
independent. He orders an approved cookery book,
lies a bed and studies it, and marvels, in a short
time, how melancholy ever gained a footing in this
mighty pleasant world. Oh money, money!—
marvellous indeed are the changes thou canst produce.
Would that I were a bank director!