Nature is his great and inexhaustible treasure. His
days are always too short for his enjoyment: _ennui_, is a stranger to
his door. At peace with the world and with his own mind, he suffices
to himself, makes all around him happy, and the close of his pleasing
and beneficial existence is the evening of a beautiful day.[6]
THE HONOURABLE MR LISTLESS
Really I should like very well to lead such a life myself, but the
exertion would be too much for me. Besides, I have been at college.
I contrive to get through my day by sinking the morning in bed,
and killing the evening in company; dressing and dining in the
intermediate space, and stopping the chinks and crevices of the few
vacant moments that remain with a little easy reading. And that
amiable discontent and antisociality which you reprobate in our
present drawing-room-table literature, I find, I do assure you, a very
fine mental tonic, which reconciles me to my favourite pursuit of
doing nothing, by showing me that nobody is worth doing any thing for.
MARIONETTA
But is there not in such compositions a kind of unconscious
self-detection, which seems to carry their own antidote with them? For
surely no one who cordially and truly either hates or despises the
world will publish a volume every three months to say so.
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