Writers of every age have endeavored to show that pleasure is in us, and
not in the objects offered for our amusement. If the soul be happily
disposed, everything becomes capable of affording entertainment, and
distress will almost want a name. Every occurrence passes in review, like
the figures of a procession; some may be awkward, others ill-dressed, but
none but a fool is on that account enraged with the master of ceremonies.

I remember to have once seen a slave, in a fortification in Flanders, who
appeared no way touched with his situation. He was maimed, deformed, and
chained; obliged to toil from the appearance of day till nightfall, and
condemned to this for life; yet, with all these circumstances of apparent
wretchedness, he sang, would have danced, but that he wanted a leg, and
appeared the merriest, happiest man of all the garrison. What a practical
philosopher was here! A happy constitution supplied philosophy, and though
seemingly destitute of wisdom he was really wise. No reading or study had
contributed to disenchant the fairyland around him. Everything furnished
him with an opportunity of mirth; and though some thought him, from his
insensibility, a fool, he was such an idiot as philosophers should wish to
imitate.

They who, like that slave, can place themselves all that side of the world
in which everything appears in a pleasant light, will find something in
every occurrence to excite their good humor. The most calamitous events,
either to themselves or others, can bring no new affliction; the world is
to them a theater, in which only comedies are acted. All the bustle of
heroism, or the aspirations of ambition, seem only to heighten the
absurdity of the scene, and make the humor more poignant. They feel, in
short, as little anguish at their own distress, or the complaints of
others, as the undertaker, though dressed in black, feels sorrow at a
funeral. Of all the men I ever read of, the famous Cardinal de Retz
possessed this happiness in the highest degree. When fortune wore her
angriest look, and he fell into the power of Cardinal Mazarin, his most
deadly enemy, (being confined a close prisoner in the castle of
Valenciennes,) he never attempted to support his distress by wisdom or
philosophy, for he pretended to neither. He only laughed at himself' and
his persecutor, and seemed infinitely pleased at his new situation. In
this mansion of distress, though denied all amusements, and even the
convenien