have been at the tavern, but I was treated; it cost me nothing. And this, he thinks, clears him of all blame; not considering that when he spends no money, yet he spends five times the value of the money in time; his business being neglected, his shop unattended, his books not posted, his letters not written, and the like; for all those things are works necessary to a tradesman, as well as the attendance on his shop, and infinitely above the pleasure of being treated at the expense of his time. All manner of pleasure should be subservient to business; he that makes his pleasure his business, will never make his business a pleasure. Innocent

pleasures become sinful when they are used to excess; and so it is here, the most innocent diversion becomes criminal when it breaks in upon that which is the due and just employment of the man's life. Pleasures rob the tradesman; and how then can he call them innocent? They are downright thieves they rob his shop of his attendance, and of the time which he ought to bestow there; they rob his family of their due support, by the man's neglecting that business by which they are to be maintained; and they oftentimes rob the creditors of their just debts, the tradesman sinking by the inordinate use of those innocent diversions, as he calls them, as well by the expense attending them, as the loss of his time and neglect of his business; by which he is at last reduced to the necessity of shutting up shop in earnest, which was indeed as good as shut before; for a shop without a master, is like the same shop on a middling holiday, half shut up; and he that keeps it long so, need not doubt but he may, in a little time, shut it quite up, and keep holiday altogether.

If I am asked how much pleasure an honestmeaning tradesman may be allowed to take, for it

cannot be supposed I should insist that all pleasure is forbidden him, that he must have no diversion, no intervals from hurry and fatigue, every prudent tradesman may make an answer for himself. If his principal pleasure is in his shop and in his business, there is no danger of him; but if he has an itch after such diversions as are foreign to his business, there is the danger, and this propension he is to learn to check; for every moment that his trade wants him in his shop, or warehouse, or countinghouse, it is his duty to be there. It is not enough to say I believe I shall not be wanted, or I believe I shall suffer no loss by my absence, he must come to a point and not deceive himself, for if he will not judge sincerely at first, he will reproach himself sincerely at last. There is, in short, a visible difference between the things which we may do, and the things which we must do. Pleasures at certain seasons are allowed, and we may give ourselves some loose to them; but business, to the man of business, is that needful thing of which it is not to be said it may, but it must be done.

To gentlemen of fortunes and estates, who are born to large possessions, and have no other avocations, it is indeed lawful to spend their spare hours on horseback with their hounds or hawks, pursuing their game; or on foot with their gun, and their net, and their dogs, to kill hares, birds, &c. These men may have the satisfaction to say they have only taken an innocent diversion; but to the tradesman no pleasure or diversion can be innocent if it injures his business, or takes either his time, his mind, his delight, or his attendance from that.

These considerations are more necessary than ever to be inculcated in the minds of young tradesmen, for there never was a time when luxury and extravagance were at so great a height. The ap

prentices now-a-days, in dress and appearance, far outgo what their masters did formerly; and many young beginners rather ape the gaieties of the court than appear like what the grave and sober citizens of the last century were willing to be thought and to appear to be. Old men formerly left not off in the manner that some young ones now begin; and the consequence is apparent in every week's Gazette, more or less. Indeed there

seems to be a general corruption of manners throughout the kingdom; and it must be next to a miracle if this flourishing nation is not reduced to some very low distress in a short time, if some methods cannot be found to curb that spirit of luxury and extravagance that seems to have seized on the minds of almost all ranks of men.

But these melancholy reflections may carry us too far from our subject, to resume which, and conclude this chapter, we will only enforce the former cautions by the following brief considerations, relating to the point we are treating of, which our author had not touched upon.

When a young man makes his health an excuse for his pleasures it is a very bad sign, except indeed he be in an ill state of health. It is a fatal pretence, and usually an insufficient one; for generally speaking a young man cannot have those occasions for unbending his mind as a man advanced in years may want. Diligence and application are his main points; and as he has youth and strength to go through more business than he generally may have at setting out, so he is to consider that a time will come, as he advances in years, when he will really want those unbendings, and cannot go through so much business as he can now manage with ease and pleasure. If he has taken his time aforehand, and used himself to diversions in the morning of

life, when his constitution stood in no need of them, he is to thank himself if he is forced to labour in the evening of his days, when a little fatigue becomes a great one, and when he should have sat down under his own vine and his own fig-tree, and enjoyed the fruits of his former application and diligence. Nor has he anybody to blame but himself if he winds up his last bottom little bigger than when he first began; and leaves perhaps a large family in a manner unprovided for, and to the mercy of a wide world, when he might have placed every branch of it in a very easy and advantageous situation.

Nay, a much worse case may possibly happen than what we have stated, since diversions, innocent in their beginning, may estrange the mind from business, and a man may become a bankrupt, and worse than nothing, by pursuing the one and neglecting the other; and his unhappy family may be left to the charity of better disposed Christians than their father deserved to be esteemed, and to be sunk down and ranked irretrievably among the dregs of the people, who might otherwise have borne a useful and reputable part in the commonwealth; and let the unhappy man who has so much reduced them and himself, call those diversions which led to this fatal catastrophe innocent if he

can.

CHAPTER X.

Of extravagant and expensive living, another step to a tradesman's disaster: in which are included expensive housekeeping, extravagance in dress, expensive company, and expensive equipage.

NEXT to immoderate pleasures, the tradesman ought to be warned against immoderate expense. This is a terrible article, and more particular so to the tradesman, as custom has now introduced a general habit of, and as it were a general inclination among all sorts of people to an expensive way of living; to which might be added a kind of necessity of it, for that even with the greatest prudence and frugality a man cannot now support a family with the ordinary expense which the same family might have been maintained with some few years ago. There is now, 1. A weight of taxes upon almost all the necessaries of life, bread and flesh excepted, as coals, salt, malt, candles, soap, leather, hops. wine, fruit, and all foreign consumptions. 2. A load of pride upon the temper of the nation, which, in spite of taxes and the unusual dearness of everything, yet prompts people to a profusion in their expenses.

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This is not so properly called a tax upon the tradesman; I think rather it may be called a plague upon them for there is, first, a dearness of every necessary thing to make living expensive; and, secondly, an unconquerable aversion to any restraint so that the poor will be like the rich, and the rich like the great, and the great like the greatest, and thus the world runs on to a kind of a