These sufferings, however, appertain but to one class of debtors.  There are others who scorn such compunctious visitations, and set all laws of conscience at defiance.  They press into their service all the aids of cunning, and travel on byroads of the world till they are bronzed enough for its highway.  Their memories are like mirrors, and their debts like breathings on them, which vanish the same moment they are produced.  They look on mankind as a large family, and the world as a large storehouse, or open house, where they have a claim proportioned to their wants.  They clear their consciences by maintaining, that what is parted with is not lost, and foster their hopes with the idea of its reversion.  They think those who can ride ought not to walk; and, therefore, that all men have the option of such chances of good-fortune.  With this laxity of principle they quarter themselves on the credulity of extortionate tradesmen, and the good-natured simplicity of friends or associates.  If, perchance, they possess any excellence above their society, they consider it as a redeeming grace for their importunities, and, calculating on the vulgarism ad captandum, that what is dearest bought is most prized, they make their friends pay freely for their admiration.  Nor are such admirers willing to break the spell by which they are bound, since, by their unqualified approval they sanction, and flatter the man of their party, to their mutual ruin; for, as Selden observes, “he who will keep a monkey should surely pay for the glasses he breaks.”

Prone as men are to the crooked path, and still more apt as the weak and ignorant are to indulge them in such a course, perhaps the love of principle is as strong in men’s hearts as it ever will be.  Of times gone by, we must not here speak; because the amor patriae 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.