was to befall me.

My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel
against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his
chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly
with me upon this subject: he asked me what reasons more than a mere
wandering inclination I had for leaving my father's house and my native
country, where I might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising
my fortune by application and industry, with a life of ease and
pleasure. He told me it was for men of desperate fortunes on one hand,
or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the other, who went abroad upon
adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make themselves famous in
undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that these things were
all either too far above me, or too far below me; that mine was the
middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life,
which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world,
the most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and
hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind,
and not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the
upper part of mankind. He told me, I might judge of the happiness of
this state by one thing, viz. that this was the state of life which all
other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable
consequences of being born to great things, and wish they had been
placed in the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the
great; that the wise man gave his testimony to this, as the just
standard of true felicity, when he prayed to have neither poverty
nor riches.

He bid me observe it, and I should always find, that the calamities of
life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the