important offices towards the general result. You are no doubt very
dependent on the care of your lawyer and stockbroker, of the guards
and signalmen who convey you rapidly from place to place, and the
policemen who walk the streets for your protection; but is there not a
thought of gratitude in your heart for certain other benefactors who
set you smiling when they fall in your way, or season your dinner with
good company? Colonel Newcome helped to lose his friend's money; Fred
Bayham had an ugly trick of borrowing shirts; and yet they were better
people to fall among than Mr. Barnes. And though Falstaff was neither
sober nor very honest, I think I could name one or two long-faced
Barabbases whom the world could better have done without. Hazlitt
mentions that he was more sensible of obligation to Northcote,[19] who
had never done him anything he could call a service, than to his whole
circle of ostentatious friends; for he thought a good companion
emphatically the greatest benefactor. I know there are people in the
world who cannot feel grateful unless the favour has been done them at
the cost of pain and difficulty. But this is a churlish disposition. A
man may send you six sheets of letter-paper covered with the most
entertaining gossip, or you may pass half an hour pleasantly, perhaps
profitably, over an article of his; do you think the service would be
greater, if he had made the manuscript in his heart's blood, like a
compact with the devil? Do you really fancy you should be more
beholden to your correspondent, if he had been damning you all the
while for your importunity? Pleasures are more beneficial than duties
because, like the quality of mercy,[20] they are not strained, and
they are twice blest. There must always be two to a kiss, and there
may be a score in a jest; but wherever there is an element of
sacrifice, the favour is conferred with pain, and, among generous
people, received with confusion. There is no duty we so much underrate
as the duty of being happy. By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits
upon the world, which remain unknown even to ourselves, or when they
are disclosed, surprise nobody so much as the benefactor. The other
day, a ragged, barefoot boy ran down the street after a marble, with
so jolly an air that he set every one he passed into a good humour;
one of these persons, who had been delivered from more than usually
black thoughts, stopped the little fellow and gave him some money with