obstinate, as the love of money. It begins to operate early, and it continues to the end of life. One of the first lessons which children learn, and one which old men never forget, is the value of money. The covetous seek and guard it for its own sake, and the prodigal himself must first be avaricious, before he can be profuse. This, of all our passions, is best able to fortify itself by reason, and is the last to yield to the force of reason. Philosophy combats, satire exposes, religion condemns it in vain: it yields neither to argument, nor ridicule, nor conscience.*

"I riches read,

And deeme them roote of all disquietnesse ;

First got with guile, and then preserved with dread;
And after spent with pride and lavishnesse,
Leaving behind them grief and heavinesse.
Infinite mischiefes of them doe arize;

Strife and debate, bloodshed and bitternesse,

Outrageous wrong, and hellish covetize,

That noble hart in great dishonour doth despize." +

This love of money, which Holy Scripture tells us is "the root of all evil," Jeremy Taylor describes as a vertiginous pool, sucking all into its vortex, to destroy it. That this love of gold is the master passion of the age, few will question. It is 66 the age of gold;" the auriferous sands of the Pacific for the western hemisphere, and those of Australia for the eastern, are incessantly pouring out their treasures to feed the insatiate cravings of avarice. The liturgy "on Change" seems to read— Man's chief end is to make money, and to enjoy it while he can. The votaries of Mammon, however, do not enjoy their possessions-they have no leisure, in their ceaseless, toilsome efforts, to augment their fortunes. A contemporary observes, with great justice:

"Many a man there is, clothed in respectability, and proud of his honour, whose central idea of life is interest and easethe conception that other men are merely tools to be used as will best serve him; that God has endowed him with sinew and brain merely to scramble and to get; and so, in the midst Hunter's Biography. + Spenser.

of this grand universe, which is a perpetual circulation of benefit, he lives like a sponge on a rock, to absorb, and bloat, and die. Thousands in the great city are living so, who never look out of the narrow circle of self-interest; whose decalogue is their arithmetic; whose Bible is their ledger; who have so contracted, and hardened, and stamped their natures, that in any spiritual estimate they would only pass as so many bags of dollars."

It is indispensable, in some cases, that men should have money, for without it they would be worth nothing. This, however, offers no apology for the universal scramble after money. Is this money-mania the highest development of our vaunted civilisation ? the summum bonum of human existence ? the Ultima Thule of human effort?

"The plague of gold strikes far and near.

And deep and strong it enters;

The purple cymar which we wear,
Makes madder than the centaurs;

Our thoughts grow blank, our words grow strange,

We cheer the pale gold-diggers,

Each soul is worth so much on 'Change,

And marked, like sheep, with figures."

"Men work for it, fight for it, beg for it, steal for it, starve for it, lie for it, live for it, and die for it. And all the while, from the cradle to the grave, Nature and God are ever thundering in our ears the solemn question- What shall it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?' This madness for money is the strongest and the lowest of the passions; it is the insatiate Moloch of the human heart, before whose remorseless altar all the finer attributes of humanity are sacrificed. It makes merchandise of all that is sacred in human affections; and even traffics in the awful solemnities of the eternal world."

"Gone, the spirit-quickening leaven,

Faith, and love, and hope in heaven-
All that warm'd the earth of old.

Dead and cold,

Its pulses flutter ;

Weak and old,

Its parched lips mutter,

Nothing nobler, nothing higher

Than the unappeased desire,

The quenchless thirst for gold!"

Money is a very good servant, but a bad master. It may be accused of injustice towards mankind, inasmuch as there are only a few who make false money, whereas money makes many false men.

Mammon is the largest slaveholder in the world—it is a composition for taking stains out of character-it is an altar on which self sacrifices to self.

"How many a man, from love of pelf,
To stuff his coffers starves himself;
Labours, accumulates, and spares,
To lay up ruin for his heirs;
Grudges the poor their scanty dole,
Saves every thing except his soul;
And always anxious, always vexed,
Loses both this world and the next!"

Shakspeare defines the sordid passion as

"Worse poison to men's souls,

Doing more murders in this loathsome world
Than any mortal drug."

In the words of Johnson, it is the

“Wide-wasting pest! that rages unconfined,

And crowds with crimes the records of mankind :

For gold, his sword the hireling ruffian draws,
For gold, the hireling judge distorts the laws;
Wealth heaped on wealth, nor truth nor safety buys,
The dangers gather as the treasures rise.”

"A miser," observes Hazlitt, "is the true alchemist, the magician in his cell, who overlooks a mighty experiment, who sees dazzling visions, and who wields the will of others at his nod, but to whom all other hopes and pleasures are dead, and who is cut off from all connection with his kind. He lives in a splendid hallucination, a waking trance, and so far it is well; but if he thinks he has any other need or use for all this end

E

less store (any more than to swell the ocean) he deceives himself, and is no conjuror after all. He goes on, however, mechanically adding to his stock, and fancying that great riches is great gain-that every particle that swells the heap is something in reserve against the evil day, and a defence against that poverty which he dreads more the further he is removed from it, as the more giddy the height to which we have attained, the more frightful does the gulf yawn below-so easily does habit get the mastery of reason, and so nearly is passion allied to madness." This is the turn the love of money takes in cautious, dry, recluse, and speculative minds. If it were the pure and abstract love of money, it could take no

other turn but this.

"The wretch concentered all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down

To the vile dust from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung."

"A miser grows rich by seeming poor," says Shenstone, "an extravagant man grows poor by seeming rich."

Wealth usually ministers to the baser passions of our nature -it engenders selfishness, feeds arrogance, and inspires selfsecurity, and deadens and stultifies the nobler feelings and holier aspirations of the heart. Wealth is a source of endless discontent; it creates more wants than it supplies, and keeps its incumbent constantly craving, crafty, and covetous. Lord Bacon says, "I cannot call riches by a better name than the 'baggage' of virtue: the Roman word is better-'impediment.' For as baggage is to an army, so are riches to virtue. It cannot be spared or left behind, and yet it hindereth the march." "Misery assails riches, as lightning does the highest towers or as a tree that is heavy laden with fruit, breaks its own boughs, so do riches destroy the virtue of their possessor."

Old Burton quaintly but forcibly observes-" Worldly wealth is the devil's bait; and those whose minds feed upon riches, recede, in general, from real happiness, in proportion as their

stores increase; as the moon, when she is fullest of light, is furthest from the sun.

A miser is, moreover, the most oblivious, as well as the most vindictive of mortals; he is said to be always for-getting, and never for-giving. He lives unloved, and dies unlamented. His self-denial is only surpassed by his denial of the poor and destitute. The miser starves himself in the midst of plenty, that he may feast his imagination on his useless hoards. Avarice, unlike most other passions, becomes more exacting as its victim increases in age. Fielding speaks of a miser, who consoled himself on his death-bed "by making a crafty and advantageous bargain concerning his funeral, with an undertaker who had married his only child." There have been examples of misers who have died in the dark to save the cost of a candle. How debasing the passion which can survive every other feeling, sear the conscience, and deaden the moral sense! "Of all creatures upon earth none is so despicable as the miser. He meets with no sympathy. Even the nurse who is hired to attend him in his latest hours, loathes the ghastly occupation, and longs for the moment of her release, for although the death-damp is already gathering on his brow, the thoughts of the departing sinner are still upon his gold; and, at the mere jingle of a key, he starts from his torpor in a paroxysm of terror, lest a surreptitious attempt is being made upon the sanctity of his strong box. There are no prayers of the orphan or widow for himnot a solitary voice has ever breathed his name to heaven as a benefactor. One poor penny given away in the spirit of true charity would now be worth more to him than all the world contains; but notwithstanding that he was a church-going man, and from his infancy familiar with those texts in which the worship of Mammon is denounced, and the punishment of Dives told, he has never yet been able to divorce himself from his solitary love of lucre, or to part with one atom of his pelf. And so, from a miserable life-deserted, despised, he passes into a dread eternity: and those whom he has neglected or misused, make with the hoards of the miser!"*

merry

* Blackwood.