I am not, it is certain, obliged to pinch myself to remove other people’s pinchings; but if a ring on my little finger has charms enough in and about it to keep half a score or half a hundred families from starving, can I hesitate a single moment, whether or no I shall part with this useless bauble for that end? If a hundred or five hundred pounds will not make me retrench in any thing, nor interfere with the figure and circumstances of life that are proper for my family now, or when I am dead and gone, what can I do better than give it to some other person or family, who are obliged to live entirely below those circumstances they are born or bred to? How can I better employ it, than in raising the spirits, and rejoicing the heart of some melancholy, depressed poor man? I am mistaken, if the application of a few hundred pounds this way, would not give a truer sensation of joy and pleasure than fifty other things, which are often purchased at a very dear rate.
Be persuaded, then, ye rich and powerful, ye honourable and great, to do honourable things with the superfluity of your wealth.
Search after ingenious persons, root them out of obscurity, and obscurity out of them, and call the long-banished muses back to their antient habitation.
MARCUS.
This article previously appeared on [pg. 247] in No. 83. The phrase “half a score or” in the central paragraph is only in the second version.
ANECDOTE.
An Irishman of the name of Scannel, who wished to get rid of his wife, wrote her a melancholy letter by the last mail from the West-Indies, in which he stated, that he died of the yellow fever after three days illness, and recommended her, and children, to the care of Providence and his friends.