live on plain food, to observe regular hours, and do regular duties--this
is no matter for tears, but for thankfulness. It is the sort of discipline
that we ought to undergo periodically for our spiritual and even bodily
health.

No, the sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is
commonly felt for the spendthrift--for the person who, no matter what his
income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no
friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as
though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no
cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends,
and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand
crowns. There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was
once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt.
And Charles Surface and Micawber--who can deny them a certain affection? I
have no doubt that Mrs. Micawber's papa, who "lived to bail Mr. Micawber
out many times until he died lamented by a wide circle of friends," loved
the fellow as you and I love him. I should deem it a privilege to bail out
Micawber. But Elwes, the miser--ugh! the very name chills the blood.

The difference, I suppose, proceeds from the idea that while the miser is
the soul of selfishness, the spendthrift is at bottom a good-natured fellow
and a lover of his kind. No doubt the vice of the spendthrift has a touch
of generosity, but it is often generosity at other people's expense, and is
not seldom as essentially selfish as the vice of the miser. It is rather
like the generosity of the man who, according to Sydney Smith, was so
touched by a charity sermon that he picked his neighbour's pocket of a
guinea and put it in the plate. I have no doubt that Lady Ida if she had
got Miss Dobbs's money would have scattered it about with a very free hand,
and would have contributed to the collection plate quite handsomely. But