“Creation’s heir—­the world, the world is mine.”—­GOLDSMITH.

Philosophers, moralists, poets, in all ages, have never better pleased themselves or satisfied their readers than when they have descanted upon, deplored, and denounced the pernicious influence of money upon the heart and the understanding.  “Filthy lucre”—­“so much trash as may be grasped thus”—­“yellow mischief,” I know not, or choose not, to recount how many justly injurious names have been applied to coin by those who knew, because they had felt, its consequences.  Wherefore, I say at once, it is better to have none on’t—­to live without it.  And yet, now I think better upon that point, it is well not altogether to discourage its approach.  On the contrary, lay hold upon it, seize it, rescue it from hands which in all probability would work ruin with it, and resolutely refuse, when it is once got, to let it go out of your grasp.  Let no absurd talk about quittance, discharge, remuneration, payment, induce the holder to relax from his inflexible purpose of palm.  Pay, like party, is the madness of many for the gain of a few.

Unhappily, vile gold, or its representation or equivalent, has been, during many centuries, the sole medium through which the majority of mankind have supplied their wants, or ministered to their luxuries.  It is high time that a sage should arise to expound how the discerning few—­those who have the wit and the will (both must concur to the great end) may live—­LIVE—­not like him who buys and balances himself by the book of the groveller who wrote “How to Live upon Fifty Pounds a Year”—­(O shame to manhood!)—­but live, I say—­“be free and merry”—­“laugh and grow fat”—­exchange the courtesies of life—­be a pattern of the “minor morals”—­and yet:  all this without a doit in bank, bureau, or breeches’ pocket.

I am that sage.  Let none deride.  Haply, I shall only remind some, but I may teach many.  Those that come to scoff, may perchance go home to prey.

Let no gentleman of the old school (for whom, indeed, my brief treatise is not designed) be startled when I advance this proposition:  That more discreditable methods are daily practised by those who live to get money, than are resorted to by those who without money are nevertheless under the necessity of living.  If this proposition be assented to—­as, in truth, I know not how it can be gainsaid,—­nothing need be urged in vindication of my art of free living.  Proceed I then at once.

Here is a youth of promise—­born, like Jaffier, with “elegant desires”—­one who does not agnize a prompt alacrity in carrying burdens—­one, rather, who recognizes a moral and physical unfitness for such, and indeed all other dorsal and manual operations—­one who has been born a Briton, and would not, therefore, sell his birthright for a mess of pottage; but, on the contrary, holds that his birthright entitles him to as many messes of pottage as there may be days to his mortal span, though time’s fingers stretched beyond the distance allotted to extreme Parr or extremest Jenkins.  “Elegant desires” are gratified to the extent I purpose treating of them, by handsome clothes—­comfortable lodgings—­good dinners.