254 HEXRY KIRKE WHITE S REMAINS. 



TO HIS BROTHER NEVILLE. 



Wint'oringham, April 1805. 

 Dear Neville, 



* * « * 



You wrote me a long sheet this time, and I have 

 every reason to be satisfied with it, yet I sometimes wish 

 I could make you write closer and smaller. Since youp 

 mind must necessarily be now much taken up with other 

 things, I dare not press my former inquiries on subjects 

 of reading. AVhen your leisure season comes, I shall 

 be happy to hoar from you on these topics. 



It is a remark of an ancient philosophical poet (Horace), 

 that every man thinks his neighbour's condition happier 

 than his own ; and, indeed, common experience shows 

 that we are too apt to entertain romantic notions of ab- 

 sent, and to think meanly of present, things ; to extol 

 what we have had no experience of, and to be discon- 

 tented with what we possess. The man of business sighs 

 for the sweets of leisure : the person who, with a taste 

 for reading, has few opportunities for it, thinks that 

 man's life the sum of bliss who has nothing to do but to 

 study. Yet it often happens that the condition of the 

 envier is happier than that of the envied. You have 

 read Dr Johnson's tale of the poor tallow-chandler, who, 

 after sighing for the quiet of country life, at length 

 scraped money enough to retire, but found his long- 

 sought-for leisure so insupportable, that he made a vo- 

 luntary offer to his successor to come up to town every 

 Friday, and melt tallow for him gratis. It would be so 

 with half the men of business, who sigh so earnestly fur 

 the sweets of retirement ; and you may receive it as one 

 of the maturest observations I have been able to make 

 on human life, that there is no condition so happy as that 

 of him who leads a life of full and constant employment 

 His amusements have a zest which men of pleasure would 

 gladly undergo all his drudgery to experience ; and the 

 regular succession of business, provided his situation be 



