V
It is a sort of gratuitous error in high life, that the poor are naturally thieves and beggars, just as the latter conceive that the rich are naturally proud and hard-hearted. Give a man who is starving a thousand a-year, and he will be no longer under a temptation to get himself hanged by stealing a leg of mutton for his dinner; he may still spend it in gaming, drinking, and the other vices of a gentleman, and not in charity, about which he before made such an outcry.