Eliza how discontented he has become with his nearest relatives, and even with his heirs. “Am I wrong, and have I any cause for doing them good?” he asks her, and desires her to give her opinion. He then intimates that he is in a weak and wretched state of health, and speaks of the vault where he wishes to be interred. He insinuates himself, and fawns on all those who visit the lady he courts. But Eliza has not courage enough to grow rich at the cost of being his wife. Whilst he is thus conversing with her a military man is introduced, and by his mere presence defeats all the plans of the worthy citizen, who gets up disappointed and vexed, and goes somewhere else to say that he wishes to marry for the second time. (83.) Wise men sometimes avoid the world, that they may not be surfeited with it. [Illustration] VI. OF THE GIFTS OF FORTUNE. (1.) A very rich man may eat of his side-dishes, have his walls and recesses painted, enjoy a palatial residence in the country and another in town, have a large retinue, even become connected with a duke through marriage,[255] and make of his son a great nobleman, and all this will be considered quite right and proper; but to live happy is perhaps the privilege of other men. (2.) A lofty birth or a large fortune portend merit, and cause it to be the sooner noticed. (3.) The ambition of a coxcomb is excusable, because, after he has made a large fortune, people will be careful to discover in him some merit which he never had before, and as great as it is in his own opinion. (4.) As favour and riches forsake a man, we discover in him the foolishness they concealed, and which no one perceived before. (5.) We could never imagine what a strange disproportion a few or a great many pieces of money make between men, if we did not see it every day with our own eyes. Those few or many pieces of money are what determine men to adopt the profession of arms, of the law, or of the church, for they have hardly any other vocation. (6.) Two merchants were neighbours and in the same line of business, but their success in life was quite different. They each had a daughter; and these, brought up together, had been as intimate as girls of the same age and the same condition in life could have been; later, one of them, driven by want and misery, endeavoured to get a place, and entered the service of a great lady, one of the highest rank at court;[256] and this same lady had formerly been her bosom friend. (7.) If a financier fails in making a lucky stroke, the courtiers say of him, “He is a mere citizen, a man sprung from nothing, a boor;” but if he succeeds, they become suitors for his daughterʼs hand. (8.) Some men in their youth serve an apprenticeship to a certain trade, to follow a very different one the rest of their lives.[257]