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In order, therefore, to prevent the great from being thus contaminated by vulgar alliances, the obstacles to matrimony have been so contrived, that the rich only can marry amongst the rich, and the poor, who would leave celibacy, must be content to increase their poverty with a wife. Thus have the laws fairly inverted the inducements to matrimony; nature tells us, that beauty is the proper allurement of those who are rich, and money of those who are poor; but things here are so contrived, that the rich are invited to marry by that fortune which they do not want, and the poor have no inducement, but that beauty which they do not feel.

An equal diffusion of riches through any country ever constitutes its happiness. Great wealth in the possession of one stagnates, and extreme poverty with another keeps him in unambitious indigence; but the moderately rich are generally active; not too far removed from poverty, to fear its calamities; nor too near extreme wealth, to slacken the nerve of labour; they remain still between both, in a state of continual fluctuation. How impolitic, therefore, are those laws which promote the accumulation of wealth among the rich, more impolitic still, in attempting to increase the depression on poverty.

Bacon, the English philosopher, compares money to manure; if gathered in heaps, says he, it does no good; on the contrary, it becomes offensive: but being spread, though never so thinly, over the surface of the earth, it enriches the whole country. Thus the wealth a nation possesses must expatiate, or it is of no benefit to the public; it becomes rather a grievance, where matrimonial laws thus confine it to a few.

But this restraint upon matrimonial community, even considered in a physical light, is injurious. As those who rear up animals take all possible pains to cross the strain, in order to improve the breed; so in

those countries where marriage is most free, the inhabitants are found every age to improve in stature and in beauty; on the contrary, where it is confined to a cast, a tribe, or a horde, as among the Gaurs, the Jews, and the Tartars, each division soon assumes a family likeness, and every tribe degenerates into peculiar deformity. From hence it may be easily inferred, that if the mandarines here are resolved only to marry among each other, they will soon produce a posterity with mandarine faces; and we shall see the heir of some honourable family scarce equal to the abortion of a country farmer.

These are a few of the obstacles to marriage here, and it is certain they have in some measure answered the end; for celibacy is both frequent and fashionable. Old bachelors appear abroad without a mask, and old maids, my dear Fum Hoam, have been absolutely known to ogle. To confess in friendship, if I were an Englishman, I fancy I should be an old bachelor myself; I should never find courage to run through all the adventures prescribed by the law. I could submit to court my mistress herself upon reasonable terms, but to court her father, her mother, and a long tribe of cousins, aunts, and relations, and then stand the butt of a whole country church, I would as soon turn tail, and make love to her grandmother.

I can conceive no other reason for thus loading matrimony with so many prohibitions, unless it be that the country was thought already too populous, and this was found to be the most effectual means of thinning it. If this was the motive, I cannot but congratulate the wise projectors on the success of their scheme. Hail, O ye dim-sighted politicians, ye weeders of men! it is yours to clip the wings of industry, and convert Hymen to a broker. It is yours to behold small objects with a microscopic eye, but to be blind to those which require an extent of

vision. It is yours, O ye discerners of mankind, to lay the line between society, and weaken that force by dividing, which should bind with united vigour. It is yours to introduce national real distress, in order to avoid the imaginary distresses of a few. Your actions can be justified by a hundred reasons like truth, they can be opposed but by a few reasons, and those reasons are true. Farewell.

LETTER LXXIII.

From Lien Chi Altangi to Hingpo, by the way of Moscow.

AGE, that lessens the enjoyments of life, increases our desire of living. Those dangers which, in the vigour of youth, we had learned to despise, assume new terrors as we grow old. Our caution increasing as our years increase, fear becomes at last the prevailing passion of the mind; and the small remainder of life is taken up in useless efforts to keep off our end, or provide for a continual existence.

Strange contradiction in our nature, and to which even the wise are liable! If I should judge of that part of life which lies before me, by that which I have already seen, the prospect is hideous. Experience tells me, that my past enjoyments have brought no real felicity; and sensation assures me, that those I have felt are stronger than those which are yet to come. Yet experience and sensation in vain persuade; hope, more powerful than either, dresses out the distant prospect in fancied beauty; some happiness in long perspective still beckons me to pursue; and, like a losing gamester, every new disappointment increases my ardour to continue the game.

Whence, my friend, this increased love of life, which grows upon us with our years? whence comes it, that we thus make greater efforts to preserve our existence at a period when it becomes scarce worth the keeping? It is that Nature, attentive to the preservation of mankind, increases our wishes to live, while she lessens our enjoyments; and, as she robs the senses of every pleasure, equips imagination in the spoil. Life would be insupportable to an old man, who, loaded with infirmities, feared death no more than when in the vigour of manhood; the numberless calamities of decaying nature, and the consciousness of surviving every pleasure, would at once induce him, with his own hand, to terminate the scene of misery; but happily the contempt of death forsakes him at a time when it could only be prejudicial; and life acquires an imaginary value, in proportion as its real value is no more.

Our attachment to every object around us increases, in general, from the length of our acquaintance with it. I would not chuse, says a French philosopher, to see an old post pulled up with which I had been long acquainted. A mind long habituated to a certain set of objects, insensibly becomes fond of seeing them, visits them from habit, and parts from them with reluctance; from hence proceeds the avarice of the old in every kind of possession. They love the world and all that it produces, they love life and all its advantages, not because it gives them pleasure, but because they have known it long.

Chinvang, the Chaste, ascending the throne of China, commanded that all who were unjustly detained in prison, during the preceding reign, should be set free. Among the number who came to thank their deliverer on this occasion, there appeared a majestic old man, who, falling at the emperor's feet, addressed him as follows :...." Great fa"ther of China, behold a wretch, now eighty-five

66 years old, who was shut up in a dungeon at the "age of twenty-two. I was imprisoned, though a

66

stranger to crime, or without being even con"fronted by my accusers. I have now lived in soli❝tude and darkness for more than fifty years, and am grown familiar with distress. As yet dazzled "with the splendour of that sun to which you have "restored me, I have been wandering the streets to "find some friend that would assist, or relieve, or re"member me; but my friends, my family, and rela❝tions, are all dead, and I am forgotten. Permit "me then, O Chinvang, to wear out the wretched re"mains of life in my former prison; the walls of my " dungeon are, to me, more pleasing than the most "splendid palace: I have not long to live, and shall "be unhappy except I spend the rest of my days "where my youth was passed; in that prison from " whence you were pleased to release me."

The old man's passion for confinement is similar to that we have all for life. We are habituated to the prison, we look round with discontent, are displeased with the abode, and yet the length of our captivity only increases our fondness for the cell. The trees we have planted, the houses we have built, or the posterity we have begotten, all serve to bind us closer to earth and embitter our parting. Life sues the young like a new acquaintance; the companion, as yet unexhausted, is at once instructive and amusing; its company pleases, yet for all this it is but little regarded. To us who are declined in years, life appears like an old friend; its jests have been anticipated in former conversation; it has no new story to make us smile, no new improvement with which to surprise, yet still we love it; husband the wasting treasure with increased frugality, and feel all the poignancy of anguish in the fatal separa

tion.

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