490 Upg and Downs of London. [MAY, 



by long tracks o r difficult country, and guarded by armed men, who 

 might render the object of his ambition not difficult merely, but altoge- 

 ther impossible, that he felt a twinge of despair, and set himself down to 

 fret and weep : it was when the conquest, the only thing about it in 

 which he took pleasure, was complete. The fable may be false, as 

 applicable to the individual ; but the moral is true of human nature. 

 The wise king of Israel did not take up his Ecclesiastes in the course of 

 his labour, or because he had been ignorant of pleasure : it was because 

 he had known and tasted that he felt sorrow ; it was the omnia 

 vanitas that poisoned the contemplation. 



Just so with a dropt man in London. All is around him, and all is 

 vanity ; and, therefore, to him hope is clear gone. He is in the very 

 centre of the world of man's creation that world in which it may, with- 

 out impiety, be said that man is mightier than his Maker inasmuch as 

 he and his works hide and eclipse every thing else. The very acme of 

 human possession and enjoyment, is every where around him ; the excess 

 of pleasure and luxury is about him on every side \ all seem to have 

 enough and to spare ; but they do not spare it nay, they do not even 

 spare so much time or pause so long in the career of enjoyment, as to 

 let the abandonnc tell them that he is destitute or miserable. Under 

 such circumstances, it requires no guilt within, no anguish of a criminal 

 nature, or even any thing of which the man can reproach himself 011 the 

 score of simple folly, to give him all the torment of the damned. He 

 does not need to have been cheated on the Stock Exchange, or plundered 

 in any of the other hells ; neither is it at all requisite that he should have 

 followed any of those courses of waste and profligacy which bring their 

 own punishment, with much sorrow to the party concerned, but with a 

 feeling of retributive justice, rather than of regret, to every body else. 

 His conduct may have been the most regular and virtuous, and his 

 schemes even the one that proved fatal to him laid with all the pru- 

 dence that human nature could muster ; and yet the utter desolation and 

 misery may be such as, elsewhere, could not be found. 



Indeed, this is a case in which innocence and virtue do not bring their 

 ordinary consolations ; but rather heap upon their unfortunate possessor 

 suffering, from which the guilty and the unthinking are exempted. 

 When suffering comes upon a man, and he is left under its pressure 

 without notice and without hope, w r hat avails it that the fault is not his ? 

 In a merely temporal point of view, the pleasure of the mens conscia 

 recti is not an ultimate pleasure ; it is only so when there is a hope that 

 it will lead to something better ; and when there is no such hope, the 

 mind and a pure mind is always more easily and more deeply affected 

 than a guilty one is left to dwell more exclusively, and therefore more 

 painfully, upon its own misery. In the depth of desolation and deser- 

 tion such as that which a man, friendless, pennyless, and without pros- 

 pect or hope feels in London the feeling of the state itself is more 

 agonizing than that of the way in which it was brought about, be 

 that what it may. Let remorse be ever so bitter, there is always a pos- 

 sibility of hope about it ; or, if there be not the hope of amendment, 

 there is the hardening of desperation, which, for the time that it lasts, 

 takes off a good deal of the agony. 



Accordingly, we find that those who break down under the burden of 

 life are not those who are deep in crime, but those who are deep in 

 misery not those who have wronged the world, but those who have 



