I have already described my environments and my mode of life, and out of both I contrive to extract a very tolerable amount of satisfaction.  Love in a cottage, with a broken window to let in the rain, is not my idea of comfort; no more is Dignity, walking forth richly clad, to whom every head uncovers, every knee grows supple.  Bruin in winter-time fondly sucking his own paws, loses flesh; and love, feeding upon itself, dies of inanition.  Take the candle of death in your hand, and walk through the stately galleries of the world, and their splendid furniture and array are as the tinsel armour and pasteboard goblets of a penny theatre; fame is but an inscription on a grave, and glory the melancholy blazon on a coffin lid.  We argue fiercely about happiness.  One insists that she is found in the cottage which the hawthorn shades.  Another that she is a lady of fashion, and treads on cloth of gold.  Wisdom, listening to both, shakes a white head, and considers that “a good deal may be said on both sides.”

There is a wise saying to the effect that “a man can eat no more than he can hold.”  Every man gets about the same satisfaction out of life.  Mr. Suddlechops, the barber of Seven Dials, is as happy as Alexander at the head of his legions.  The business of the one is to depopulate kingdoms, the business of the other to reap beards seven days old; but their relative positions do not affect the question.  The one works with razors and soap-lather the other with battle-cries and well-greaved Greeks.  The one of a Saturday night counts up his shabby gains and grumbles; the other on his Saturday night sits down and weeps for other worlds to conquer.  The pence to Mr. Suddlechops are as important as are the worlds to Alexander.  Every condition of life has its peculiar advantages, and wisdom points these out and is contented with them.  The varlet who sang—­

  “A king cannot swagger
  Or get drunk like a beggar,
  Nor be half so happy as I”—­

had the soul of a philosopher in him.  The harshness of the parlour is revenged at night in the servants’ hall.  The coarse rich man rates his domestic, but there is a thought in the domestic’s brain, docile and respectful as he looks, which makes the matter equal, which would madden the rich man if he knew it—­make him wince as with a shrewdest twinge of hereditary gout.  For insult and degradation are not without their peculiar solaces.  You may spit upon Shylock’s gaberdine, but the day comes when he demands his pound of flesh; every blow, every insult, not without a certain satisfaction, he adds to the account running up against you in the day-book and ledger of his hate—­which at the proper time he will ask you to discharge.  Every way we look we see even-handed nature administering her laws of compensation.  Grandeur has a heavy tax to pay.  The usurper rolls along like a god, surrounded by his guards.  He dazzles the crowd—­all very fine; but look beneath his splendid trappings and you see a shirt of mail, and beneath that a heart cowering in terror of an air-drawn dagger.  Whom did the memory of Austerlitz most keenly sting?  The beaten emperor? or the mighty Napoleon, dying like an untended watch-fire on St. Helena?