Frugality makes a poor man rich.

desirable condition, for no man wants power to do mischief. We never consider the blessing of coveting nothing, and the glory of being full in ourselves, without depending upon fortune. With parsimony a little is sufficient, and without it nothing; whereas frugality makes a poor man rich. If we lose an estate, we had better never have had it: he that has least to lose, has least to fear; and those are better satisfied whom fortune never favoured, than those whom she has forsaken. The state is most commodious that lies betwixt poverty and plenty. Diogenes understood this very well, when he put himself into an incapacity of losing any thing. That course of life is most commodious, which is both safe and wholesome; the body is to be indulged no farther than for health, and rather mortified than not kept in subjection to the mind. It is necessary to provide against hunger, thirst, and cold, and somewhat for a covering to shelter us against other inconveniences, but not a pin matter whether it be of turf, or of marble. A man may lie as warm, and as dry, under a thatched as under a gilded roof. Let the mind be great and glorious, and all other things are despicable in comparison. The future is uncertain, and I had rather beg of myself not to desire any thing, than of fortune to bestow it.

Anger described.

OF ANGER.

ANGER DESCRIBED;

IT IS AGAINST NATURE, AND

ONLY TO BE FOUND IN MAN.

WE are here to encounter the most outrageous, brutal, dangerous, and intractable of all passions, the most loathsome and unmannerly, nay, the most ridiculous too; and the subduing of this monster will do a great Ideal toward the establishment of human peace. It is the method of physicians to begin with a description of the disease, before they meddle with the cure; and I know not why this may not do as well in the distempers of the mind, as in those of the body.

The Stoics will have anger to be-a desire of punishing another for some injury done. Against which it is objected, that we are many times angry with those that never did hurt us, but possibly may, though the harm be not as yet done. But, I say, that they hurt us already in conceit, and the very purpose of it is an injury in thought before it breaks out into an act. It is opposed again—that if anger were a desire of punishing, mean people would not be angry with great ones, that are out of their reach; for no man can be said to desire any thing which he judges impossible to compass. But, I answer to this, that anger is the desire, not the power, and faculty of revenge: neither is any man so low, but that the greatest man alive may, peradventure, lie at his mercy.

It is against nature.

Aristotle takes anger to be-a desire of paying sorrow for sorrow, and of plaguing those that have plagued us. It is argued against both, that beasts are angry, though neither provoked by any injury, nor moved with a desire of any body's grief, or punishment; nay, though they cause it, they do not design or seek it. Neither is anger (how unreasonable soever in itself) found any where but in reasonable creatures. It is true, that beasts have an impulse of rage and fierceness, as they are more affected also than men with some pleasures; but we may as well call them luxurious and ambitious, as angry; and yet they are not without certain images of human affections. They have their likings and their loathings, but neither the passions of reasonable nature, nor their virtues, nor their vices. They are moved to fury by some objects, they are quieted by others; they have their terrors and their disappointments, but without reflection; and let them be ever so irritated, or affrighted, so soon as ever the occasion is removed, they fall to their meat again, lie down, and take their rest. Wisdom and thought are the goods of the mind, whereof brutes are wholly incapable; and we are as unlike them within, as we are without; they have an odd kind of fancy, and they have a voice too, but inarticulate and confused, and incapable of those variations which are familiar to us.

Anger is not only a vice, but a vice point blank against nature, for it divides instead of joining, and, in some measure, frustrates the end of Providence in human society. One man was born to help another: anger makes us destroy one another; the one unites, the other separates; the one is beneficial to us, the other mis

Several sorts of anger.

chievous; the one succours even strangers, the other destroys even the most intimate friends; the one ventures all to save another, the other ruins himself to undo another. Nature is bountiful, but anger is pernicious; for it is not fear, but mutual love that binds up mankind.

There are some motions that look like anger, which cannot properly be called so; as the passion of the people against the gladiators, when they hang off, and will not make so quick a dispatch as the spectators would have them: there is something in it of the humour of children, that if they get a fall, will never leave bawling until the naughty ground is beaten, and then all is well again. They are angry without any cause, or injury; they are deluded by an imitation of strokes, and pacified with counterfeit tears. A false, and a childish sorrow, is appeased with as false and as childish a revenge. They take it for a contempt, if the gladiators do not immediately cast themselves upon the sword's point. They look presently about them, from one to another, as who should say-Do but see, my masters, how these rogues abuse us.

To descend to the particular branches and varieties, would be unnecessary and endless. There is a stubborn, a vindictive, a quarrelsome, a violent, a froward, a sullen, a morose kind of anger; and then we have this variety in complication too. One goes no farther than words; another proceeds immediately to blows, without a word speaking; a third sort breaks out into cursing and reproachful language; and there are that content themselves with chiding and complaining. There is a conciliable anger, and there is an implacable; but in what form or degree soever it appears, all anger without exception is vicious.

Of its various motions.-Anger a precipitate passion.

THE RISE OF ANGER.

THE question will be here-Whether anger takes its rise from impulse, or judgment? That is, whether it be moved of its own accord, or, as many other things are, from within us, that arise we know not how? The clearing of this point will lead us to greater matters.

The first motion of anger is, in truth, involuntary, and only a kind of menacing preparation towards it. The second deliberates, as who should say—this injury should not pass without a revenge, and there it stops. The third is impotent, and right or wrong, resolves upon vengeance. The first motion is not to be avoided, nor indeed the second any more than yawning for company custom and care may lessen it, but reason itself cannot overcome it. The third, as it rises upon consideration, it must fall so too; for that motion which proceeds with judgment, may be taken away with judgment.

A man thinks himself injured, and hath a mind to be revenged, but for some reason lets it rest. This is not properly anger, but an affection over-ruled by reason: a kind of proposal disapproved. And what are reason and affection, but only changes of the mind, for the better, or for the worse? Reason deliberates before it judges; but anger passes sentence without deliberation. Reason only attends the matter in hand; but anger is startled at every accident: it passes the bounds of reason, and carries it away with it. In short-anger is an agitation of the mind that proceeds to the resolution of a revenge, the mind assenting to it. There is no doubt but anger is moved by the species of an injury, but whe