his hair was white.  What happened to him finally I do not know.  I missed him for a year or two; inquired at the hotel where he had lived and found him gone; and I thought I read in the sarcastic smile of the hotel-manager more knowledge than he was willing to communicate.  I imagine that he went down in some financial storm, like ships at sea that are heard of no more; the Napoleon of finance had somewhere found his Waterloo.  The reflection is inevitable; what had he got out of life after all?  He had won neither peace nor honour; he had known nothing of the finer joys or tastes; he had enjoyed no satisfying pleasures; such triumph as he had known had been the brief triumph of the gambler.  Upon the whole I thought the narrow tedious life of Arrowsmith the worthier.

Reflections of this nature are usually attributed to mere envy or contempt of wealth, which is a temper not less sordid than a love of wealth.  For my part I can but profess that I feel for wealth neither envy nor contempt.  On the contrary, I love to imagine myself wealthy, and I flatter myself—­as most poor men do—­that I am a person peculiarly fitted by nature to afford a conspicuous example of how wealth should be employed.  I like to dramatise my fancies, and the more impossible these fancies are, the more convincing is the drama that can be educed from them.  Thus I have several times built palaces which have rivalled the splendours of the Medici; I have administered great estates to the entire satisfaction of my tenants; I have established myself as the Maecenas of art and literature; and were I ever called to play these parts in reality, I am convinced that my competence would secure applause.  The point at which I stick, however, is this:  rich men rarely do these things.  It is the pursuit of wealth, rather than wealth itself, that is their pleasure.  Let us suppose the case of a man who has toiled with undivided mind for thirty years to acquire a fortune; will it not be usually found that in the struggle to be rich he has lost those very qualities which make riches worth possessing?  He buys his estate or builds his house; but there is little pleasure in the business.  He is the mere slave of land-agents, the puppet of architects and upholsterers.  He has no original taste to guide or interest him:  what he once had has perished long ago in the dreary toil of money-grubbing.  The men who build or decorate his house have a certain pleasure in their work; all that he does is to pay them for being happy.  If he should adopt the rich man’s hobby of collecting pictures or a library, he rarely enjoys a higher pleasure than the mere lust of possession.  He buys what he is told to buy, without discrimination; he has no knowledge of what constitutes rarity or value; and most certainly he knows nothing of those excitements of the quest which make the collection of articles of vertu a pursuit so fascinating to the man of trained judgment but moderate means.  And, as if to complete the irony