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BNL.750.012
23 Aug 1750:11,12 (2519)
From the Daily Gazetteer. To the Fool. No. 649.
Pleasure, or wrong or rightly understood,
Our greatest evil, or our greatest good. Pope.
Our forefathers could be content with two or three hours
recreation, when the business of the day was over; but their
wiser offspring scorn to be so stinted. We must, forsooth,
begin the day in diversions: We cannot breakfast without a
concert of musick; we fly from one entertainment to another,
shifting the scenes of folly, running from routs to drums,
from the bear-garden to the ball or masquerade, and closing
the day in superlative madness at the gaming-table. And is
it then wonder that this hare-brained pursuit of pernicious
pleasures has produced a multiplicity of other vices and
crimes ? Prodigality is the direct road to poverty; but to
guard against this worst of evils, the prodigal will not
stick at bartering away the liberties of his country. . .
[10 lines + 2 more paras.]
[signed] Old Sterling.
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