ometimes in
serious, discourse, with this particular pleasure, which gives the only
true relish to all conversation, a sense that every one of us liked each
other. I went home, considering the different conditions of a married
life and that of a bachelor; and I must confess it struck me with a
secret concern, to reflect, that whenever I go off I shall leave no
traces behind me. In this pensive mood I return to my family; that is to
say, to my maid, my dog, and my cat, who only can be the better or worse
for what happens to me.

XIII.--DEAD FOLK.

From my own Apartment, November 17.

It has cost me very much care and thought to marshal and fix the people
under their proper denominations, and to range them according to their
respective characters. These my endeavours have been received with
unexpected success in one kind, but neglected in another; for though I
have many readers, I have but few converts. This must certainly proceed
from a false opinion, that what I write is designed rather to amuse and
entertain than convince and instruct. I entered upon my Essays with a
declaration that I should consider mankind in quite another manner than
they had hitherto been represented to the ordinary world, and asserted
that none but a useful life should be, with me, any life at all. But,
lest this doctrine should have made this small progress towards the
conviction of mankind, because it may appear to the unlearned light and
whimsical, I must take leave to unfold the wisdom and antiquity of my
first proposition in these my essays, to wit, that "every worthless man
is a dead man." This notion is as old as Pythagoras, in whose school
it was a point of discipline, that if among the Akoustikoi, * or
probationers, there were any who grew weary of studying to be useful,
and returned to an idle life, the rest were to regard them as dead, and
upon their departing, to perform their obsequies and raise them tombs,
with inscriptions, to warn others of the like mortality, and quicken
them to resolutions of refining their souls above that wretched state.
It is upon a like supposition that young ladies, at this very time, in
Roman Catholic countries, are received into some nunneries with
their coffins, and with the pomp of a formal funeral, to signify that
henceforth they are to be of no further use, and consequently dead. Nor
was Pythagoras himself the first author of this symbol, with whom, and
with the Hebrews, it was generally re