Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 17.djvu/345



VARICE (as sir Richard, in the third page of his Essays, has elegantly observed) is an inordinate impulse of the soul, toward the amassing or heaping together a superfluity of wealth, without the least regard of applying it to its proper uses.

And how the mind of man is possessed with this vice, may be seen every day both in the city and suburbs thereof. It has been always esteemed by Plato, Puffendorf, and Socrates, as the darling vice of old age: but now our young men are turned usurers and stockjobbers; and, instead of lusting after the real wives and daughters of our rich citizens, they covet nothing but their money and estates. Strange change of vice! when the concupiscence of youth is converted into the covetousness of age, and those appetites are now become venal, which should be venereal. Rh