“I wish I could persuade my parents that they might place some little confidence in my judgment at the age I now am (nearly twenty-four), an age when, in ordinary people, the judgment has reached a certain degree of maturity.  It is a singular and, I think, an unfortunate fact that I have not, that I recollect, since I have been in England, had a turn of low spirits except when I have received letters from home.  It is true I find a great deal of affectionate solicitude in them, but with it I also find so much complaint and distrust, so much fear that I am doing wrong, so much doubt as to my morals and principles, and fear lest I should be led away by bad company and the like, that, after I have read them, I am miserable for a week.  I feel as though I had been guilty of every crime, and I have passed many sleepless nights after receiving letters from you.  I shall not sleep to-night in consequence of passages in your letters just received.”

Here he quotes from his mother’s letter and answers: 

“Now as to the young man’s living for six hundred dollars, I know who it is of whom you speak.  It is Dr. Parkman, who made it his boast that he would live for that sum, but you did not enquire how he lived.  I can tell you.  He never refused an invitation to dine, breakfast, or tea, which he used to obtain often by pushing himself into everybody’s company.  When he did not succeed in getting invitations, he invited himself to breakfast, dine, or sup with some of his friends.  He has often walked up to breakfast with us, a distance of three or four miles.  If he failed in getting a dinner or meal at any of these places, he either used to go without, or a bit of bread answered the purpose till next meal.  In his dress he was so shabby and uncouth that any decent person would be ashamed to walk with him in the street.  Above all, his notorious meanness in his money matters, his stickling with his poor washerwoman for a halfpenny and with others for a farthing, and his uniform stinginess on all occasions rendered him notoriously disgusting to all his acquaintances, and affords, I should imagine, but a poor example for imitation....

“The fact is I could live for fifty pounds a year if my only object was to live cheap, and, on the other hand, if I was allowed one thousand pounds a year, I could spend it all without the least extravagance in obtaining greater advantages in my art.  But as your goodness has allowed me but two hundred pounds (and I wish you again to receive my sincere thanks for this allowance), should not my sole endeavor be to spend all this to the utmost advantage; to keep as closely within the bounds of that allowance as possible, and would not economy in this instance consist in rigidly keeping up to this rule?  If this is a true statement of the case, then have I been perfectly economical, for I have not yet overrun my allowance, and I think I shall be able to return home without having exceeded it a single shilling.  If I have done this, and still continue to do it, why, in every letter I receive from home, is the injunction repeated of being economical? It makes me exceedingly unhappy, especially when I am conscious of having used my utmost endeavors, ever since I have been in England, to be rigidly so.