by, we must not here speak; because the _amor patriæ_ its has long
since shifted to _amor nummi_, and naked honesty has learned the
decency of dress. There have been profligates in all ages; but the
world, though sometimes a severe master, ruins as many by its deceitful
indulgence, as by its ill-timed severity. Good fellows are usually the
worst treated by the world allowing them to go beyond their tether, and
then cutting them off out of harm's way. Nothing but an earlier
discipline can improve us; for so habitual is debt, that the boy who
forestals his pocket-money uses it as a step-ladder to mortgaging his
estate. The sufferers, in such cases, are generally shut up in prisons
or poor-houses, to afflict or console each other as their sensibilities
may direct; and thus the salutary lessons, which their condition might
afford, is lost to the world. Neither are such scenes of real misery
courted by mankind; the nearest semblances which they can bear being in
the sentimentalities of the stage, encumbered as they often are by
overstrained fiction and caricature. On the contrary, a walk through
those receptacles of human woe, and the little histories of their
inmates, will often furnish as many lessons of morality and
world-knowledge as will suffice us for life. We may there see the
rapacious creditor at the same goal with the unfortunate debtor, whom he
has hunted through life, supplicating mercy which he never exercised,
and vainly attempting to recant a course of cruelty and persecution, by
mixing up his merited sufferings with the distresses of his abused
companions.

Goldsmith has said, that "every man is the architect of his own
fortune;" and perhaps there are few men, who, in the moments of their
deepest suffering, have not felt the force of this assertion. In high
life, embarrassments are generally to be attributed to the love of
gambling, prodigality, or some such sweeping vice, which no station can