What the loss on such a balance might amount to, _communibus annis_, I would leave to a special jury of sufferers in the same traffick, to determine; --but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore it for many years without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill accidents of the kind, he found it necessary to take the thing under consideration; and upon weighing the whole, and summing it up in his mind, he found it not only disproportioned to his other expences, but withal so heavy an article in itself, as to disable him from any other act of generosity in his parish: Besides this, he considered that with half the sum thus galloped away, he could do ten times as much good; --and what still weighed more with him than all other considerations put together, was this, that it confined all his charity into one particular channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the least wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his parish; reserving nothing for the impotent, --nothing for the aged, --nothing for the many comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where poverty, and sickness, and affliction dwelt together. For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expence; and there appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it; --and these were, either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his steed upon any application whatever, --or else be content to ride the last poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and infirmities, to the very end of the chapter. As he dreaded his own constancy in the first--he very chearfully betook himself to the second; and though he could very well have explained it, as I said, to his honour, --yet, for that very reason, he had a spirit above it; choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies, and the laughter of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which might seem a panegyrick upon himself. I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this reverend gentleman, from this single stroke in his character, which I think comes up to any of the honest refinements of the peerless knight of _La Mancha_, whom, by the bye, with all his follies, I love more, and would actually have gone farther to have paid a visit to, than the greatest hero of antiquity.