"--"Do you call it a small misfortune to be ruined in
money-matters?" he asked. "It is not so painful, at all events,
as the loss of friends."--"I grant that," he said. "As the loss
of character?"--"True again." "As the loss of health?"--"Ay,
there you have me," he muttered to himself, in a tone so
melancholy that I wished I had not spoken. "What is the loss of
fortune to the loss of peace of mind?" I continued. "In short,"
said he, playfully, "you will make it out that there is no harm in
a man's being plunged over-head-and-ears in a debt he cannot
remove." "Much depends, I think, on how it was incurred, and what
efforts are made to redeem it--at least, if the sufferer be a
rightminded man." "I hope it does," he said, cheerfully and
firmly.--FRAGMENTS OF VOYAGES AND TRAVELS, 3rd series, pp. 308-9.
(18) "These battles," he wrote in his Diary, "have been the death of
many a man, I think they will be mine."
(19) Scott's Diary, December 17th, 1827.
CHAPTER VII.--DUTY--TRUTHFULNESS.
"I slept, and dreamt that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty."
"Duty! wondrous thought, that workest neither by fond insinuation,
flattery, nor by any threat, but merely by holding up thy naked
law in the soul, and so extorting for thyself always reverence, if
not always obedience; before whom all appetites are dumb, however
secretly they rebel"--KANT.
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