time I found happiness equal to my expectation. I reformed
the old house according to the advice of the best architects, I threw
down the walls of the garden, and enclosed it with palisades, planted
long avenues of trees, filled a green-house with exotick plants, dug a
new canal, and threw the earth into the old moat.

The fame of these expensive improvements brought in all the country to
see the show. I entertained my visitors with great liberality, led them
round my gardens, showed them my apartments, laid before them plans for
new decorations, and was gratified by the wonder of some and the envy of
others.

I was envied: but how little can one man judge of the condition of
another! The time was now coming, in which affluence and splendour could
no longer make me pleased with myself. I had built till the imagination
of the architect was exhausted; I had added one convenience to another,
till I knew not what more to wish or to design; I had laid out my
gardens, planted my park, and completed my water-works; and what now
remained to be done? what, but to look up to turrets, of which when they
were once raised I had no further use, to range over apartments where
time was tarnishing the furniture, to stand by the cascade of which I
scarcely now perceived the sound, and to watch the growth of woods that
must give their shade to a distant generation.

In this gloomy inactivity, is every day begun and ended: the happiness
that I have been so long procuring is now at an end, because it has been
procured; I wander from room to room, till I am weary of myself; I ride
out to a neighbouring hill in the centre of my estate, from whence all
my lands lie in prospect round me; I see nothing that I have not seen
before, and return home disappointed, though I knew that I had nothing
to expect.

In my happy days of business I had been accustomed to rise early in the
morning; and remember the time when I grieved that the night came so
soon upon me, and obliged me for a few hours to shut out affluence and
prosperity. I now seldom see the rising sun, but to "tell him," with the
fallen angel, "how I hate his beams[1]." I awake from sleep as to
languor or imprisonment, and have no employment for the first hour but
to consider by what art I shall rid myself of the second. I protract the
breakfast as long as I can, because when it is ended I have no call for
my attention, till I can with some degree of decency grow impatient for
my dinner.