Let us turn the tables and look at the other side of this sober, solid, ingrossing passion for property and its appendages. A man lays out a thousand, nay, sometimes many thousand pounds in purchasing a fine picture. This is thought, by the vulgar, a very fantastical folly, and unaccountable waste of money. Why so? No one would give such a sum for a picture, unless there were others ready to offer nearly the same sum, and who are likely to appreciate its value, and envy him the distinction. It is then a sign of taste, a proof of wealth to possess it, it is an ornament and a luxury. If the same person lays out the same sum of money in building or purchasing a fine house, or enriching it with costly furniture, no notice is taken—this is supposed to be perfectly natural and in order. Yet both are equally gratuitous pieces of extravagance, and the value of the objects is, in either case, equally _ideal_. It will be asked, ‘But what is the use of the picture?’ And what, pray, is the use of the fine house or costly furniture, unless to be looked at, to be admired, and to display the taste and magnificence of the owner? Are not pictures and statues as much furniture as gold plate or jasper tables; or does the circumstance of the former having a meaning in them, and appealing to the imagination as well as to the senses, neutralize their virtue, and render it entirely chimerical and visionary? It is true, every one must have a house of some kind, furnished somehow, and the superfluity so far grows imperceptibly out of the necessary. But a fine house, fine furniture, is necessary to no man, nor of more value than the plainest, except as a matter of taste, of fancy, of luxury and ostentation. Again, no doubt, if a person is in the habit of keeping a number of servants, and entertaining a succession of fashionable guests, he must have more room than he wants for himself, apartments suitably decorated to receive them, and offices and stables for their horses and retinue. But is all this unavoidably dictated as a consequence of his attention to the _main-chance_, or is it not sacrificing the latter, and making it a stalking-horse to his vanity, dissipation, or love of society and hospitality? We are at least as fond of spending money as of making it. If a man runs through a fortune in the way here spoken of, is it out of love to himself? Yet who scruples to run through a fortune in this way, or accuses himself of any extraordinary disinterestedness or love of others? One bed is as much as any one can sleep in, one room is as much as he can dine in, and he may have another for study or to retire to after dinner—but he can only want more than this for the accommodation of his friends, or the admiration of strangers. At Fonthill Abbey (to take an extreme illustration), there was not a single room fit to sit, lie, or stand in: the whole was cut up into pigeon holes, or spread out into long endless galleries. The building this huge, ill-assorted pile