Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 12.djvu/71

Rh long, sink into your heart, the proper seat of passions. Plato, whom you cite, looked upon riches, and the other advantages of fortune, to be desirable; but he declared, as you have read in Diogenes Laertius; Ea etsi non affluerint, nihilominus tamen beatum fore sapientem. You may think it, perhaps, hard to reconcile his two journies into Sicily with this maxim, especially since he got fourscore talents of the tyrant. But I can assure you, that he went to the elder Dionysius only to buy books, and to the younger only to borrow a piece of ground, and a number of men, women, and children, to try his Utopia. Aristippus was in Sicily at the same time; and there passed some billingsgate between these reverend persons. This philosopher had a much stronger fancy to grow rich than Plato: he flattered, he cracked jests and danced over a stick to get some of the Sicilian gold; but still even he took care, sibi res, non se rebus submittere. And I remember, with great edification, how he reproved one of his catechumens, who blushed, and shrunk back, when his master showed him the way to the bawdy house. Non ingredi turpe est, sed egredi non posse turpe est. The conclusion of all this is; un honnête homme ought to have cent mille livres de rente, if you please; but a wise man will be happy with the hundredth part. Let us not refuse riches, when they offer themselves; but let us give them no room in our heads or our hearts. Let us enjoy wealth, without suffering it to become necessary to us. And, to finish with one of Seneca's quaint sentences; "Let us place it so, that fortune may take it without tearing it from us." The passage you mention does follow that, which I quoted to