The absorbing desire for wealth--"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all things good"--like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping." Almost every act may be a lie against the thought or motive which prompted it. The great aim of the mere money-getter--to get and get forever--involves him in false pretense and practical falsehood. He advises to inveigle; he condoles and sympathizes to ruin. He talks of liberalty, and never gives. He depreciates money and the love of it, at the same time glows and dimples with the consciousness of his possessions. He calls life a humbug or muck, and proves it by a hypocritical exhibit of his gains. He puts a penny in the urn of poverty, and sees clearly how he will get a shilling out. He whines for wretchedness, forgetting the number he has made wretched. He gives to religion, and plunders her devotees. He hires an expensive pew near the pulpit, and cheats his woodsawyer and washerwoman. He builds costly churches with tall steeples, and, writing the Almighty in his list of debtors, formally bargains admission to heaven. "He falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities, nor its pleasures, for his trouble. He begins to accumulate treasure as a mean to happiness, and by a common but morbid association he continues to accumulate it as an end. He lives poor to die rich, and is the mere jailer of his house, and the turnkey of his wealth. Impoverished by his gold, he slaves harder to imprison it in his chest than his brother-slave to liberate it from the mine." "Some men," says Chrysippus, in Athenaeus, "apply themselves with such eagerness to the pursuit of money, that it is even related, that a man once, when near his end, swallowed a number of pieces of gold, and so died. Another person sewed a quantity of money into a tunic, and put it on, and then ordered his servants to bury him in that dress, neither burning his body, nor stripping it and laying it out." Foote, in endeavoring to express the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his acquaintance, expressed a belief that he would be willing to take the beam out of his own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless, one source of the miser's insane covetousness and parsimony is the tormenting fear of dying a beggar--that "fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, "by which he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's-length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance." ("All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil," impatiently exclaimed Dr. Johnson, "show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how miserable a king must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place." "One asks," says La Bruyere, "if, in comparing the different conditions