The Man of Feeling | Page 4

parson look back into his sermon for some precept of
Christian humility.

CHAPTER XII
--OF WORLDLY INTERESTS

There are certain interests which the world supposes every man to have,
and which therefore are properly enough termed worldly; but the world
is apt to make an erroneous estimate: ignorant of the dispositions which
constitute our happiness or misery, they bring to an undistinguished
scale the means of the one, as connected with power, wealth, or
grandeur, and of the other with their contraries. Philosophers and poets
have often protested against this decision; but their arguments have
been despised as declamatory, or ridiculed as romantic.
There are never wanting to a young man some grave and prudent
friends to set him right in this particular, if he need it; to watch his
ideas as they arise, and point them to those objects which a wise man
should never forget.
Harley did not want for some monitors of this sort. He was frequently
told of men whose fortunes enabled them to command all the luxuries
of life, whose fortunes were of their own acquirement: his envy was

invited by a description of their happiness, and his emulation by a
recital of the means which had procured it.
Harley was apt to hear those lectures with indifference; nay, sometimes
they got the better of his temper; and as the instances were not always
amiable, provoked, on his part, some reflections, which I am persuaded
his good-nature would else have avoided.
Indeed, I have observed one ingredient, somewhat necessary in a man's
composition towards happiness, which people of feeling would do well
to acquire; a certain respect for the follies of mankind: for there are so
many fools whom the opinion of the world entitles to regard, whom
accident has placed in heights of which they are unworthy, that he who
cannot restrain his contempt or indignation at the sight will be too often
quarrelling with the disposal of things to relish that share which is
allotted to himself. I do not mean, however, to insinuate this to have
been the case with Harley; on the contrary, if we might rely on his own
testimony, the conceptions he had of pomp and grandeur served to
endear the state which Providence had assigned him.
He lost his father, the last surviving of his parents, as I have already
related, when he was a boy. The good man, from a fear of offending, as
well as a regard to his son, had named him a variety of guardians; one
consequence of which was, that they seldom met at all to consider the
affairs of their ward; and when they did meet, their opinions were so
opposite, that the only possible method of conciliation was the
mediatory power of a dinner and a bottle, which commonly interrupted,
not ended, the dispute; and after that interruption ceased, left the
consulting parties in a condition not very proper for adjusting it. His
education therefore had been but indifferently attended to; and after
being taken from a country school, at which he had been boarded, the
young gentleman was suffered to be his own master in the subsequent
branches of literature, with some assistance from the parson of the
parish in languages and philosophy, and from the exciseman in
arithmetic and book-keeping. One of his guardians, indeed, who, in his
youth, had been an inhabitant of the Temple, set him to read Coke upon
Lyttelton: a book which is very properly put into the hands of beginners
in that science, as its simplicity is accommodated to their
understandings, and its size to their inclination. He profited but little by
the perusal; but it was not without its use in the family: for his maiden

aunt applied it commonly to the laudable purpose of pressing her
rebellious linens to the folds she had allotted them.
There were particularly two ways of increasing his fortune, which
might have occurred to people of less foresight than the counsellors we
have mentioned. One of these was, the prospect of his succeeding to an
old lady, a distant relation, who was known to be possessed of a very
large sum in the stocks: but in this their hopes were disappointed; for
the young man was so untoward in his disposition, that,
notwithstanding the instructions he daily received, his visits rather
tended to alienate than gain the good-will of his kinswoman. He
sometimes looked grave when the old lady told the jokes of her youth;
he often refused to eat when she pressed him, and was seldom or never
provided with sugar-candy or liquorice when she was seized with a fit
of coughing: nay, he had once the rudeness to fall asleep while she was
describing the composition and virtues of her favourite cholic-water. In
short, be