Remorse,
shame, anguish, rage, disappointment, anxiety, fear, dejection,
despair; who has ever passed through life without cruel inroads
from these tormentors? How many have scarcely ever felt any
better sensations? Labour and poverty, so abhorred by every one,
are the certain lot of the far greater number; and those few
privileged persons, who enjoy ease and opulence, never reach
contentment or true felicity. All the goods of life united would
not make a very happy man; but all the ills united would make a
wretch indeed; and any one of them almost (and who can be free
from every one?) nay often the absence of one good (and who can
possess all?) is sufficient to render life ineligible.
Were a stranger to drop on a sudden into this world, I would
show him, as a specimen of its ills, a hospital full of diseases,
a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle
strewed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation
languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence. To turn the gay
side of life to him, and give him a notion of its pleasures;
whither should I conduct him? to a ball, to an opera, to court?
He might justly think, that I was only showing him a diversity of
distress and sorrow.
There is no evading such striking instances, said P/HILO\,
but by apologies, which still further aggravate the charge. Why
have all men, I ask, in all ages, complained incessantly of the
miseries of life? .
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