Euripides said that money finds friends for men, and has great (he said the greatest) power among Mankind, cynically adding, "A mighty person indeed is a rich man, especially if his heir be unknown."
Bossuet tells us that "he had no attachment to riches, still if he had only what was barely necessary, he felt himself narrowed, and would lose more than half his talents."
Shelley was certainly not an avaricious man, and yet "I desire money," he said, "because I think I know the use of it. It commands labor, it gives leisure; and to give leisure to those who will employ it in the forwarding of truth is the noblest present an individual can make to the whole."
Many will have felt with Pepys when he quaintly and piously says, "Abroad with my wife, the first time that ever I rode in my own coach; which do make my heart rejoice and praise God, and pray him to bless it to me, and continue it."
This, indeed, was a somewhat selfish satisfaction. Yet the merchant need not quit nor be ashamed of his profession, bearing in mind only the inscription on the Church of St. Giacomo de Rialto at Venice: "Around this temple let the merchant's law be just, his weight true, and his covenants faithful." [2]
If life has been sacrificed to the rolling up of money for its own sake, the very means by which it was acquired will prevent its being enjoyed; the chill of poverty will have entered into the very bones. The term Miser was happily chosen for such persons; they are essentially miserable.
"A collector peeps into all the picture shops of Europe for a landscape of Poussin, a crayon sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre, where every footman may see them: to say nothing of Nature's pictures in every street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human body never absent. A collector recently bought at public auction in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare: but for nothing a schoolboy can read Hamlet, and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein." [3] And yet "What hath the owner but the sight of it with his eyes." [4]
We are really richer than we think. We often hear of Earth hunger. People envy a great Landlord, and fancy how delightful it must be to possess a large estate. But, as Emerson says, "if you own land, the land owns you." Moreover, have we not all, in a better sense—have we not all thousands of acres of our own? The commons, and roads, and footpaths, and the seashore, our grand and varied coast—these are all ours. The sea-coast has, moreover, two great advantages. In the first place, it is for the most part but little interfered with by man, and in the second it exhibits most instructively the forces of Nature. We are all great landed proprietors, if we only knew it. What we lack is not land, but the power to enjoy it. Moreover, this great inheritance has the additional advantage that it entails no labor, requires no management. The landlord has the trouble, but the landscape belongs to every one who has eyes to see it. Thus Kingsley called the heaths round Eversley his "winter garden;" not because they were his in the eye of the law, but in that higher sense in which ten thousand persons may own the same thing.
[1] Epictetus.
[2] Ruskin.