"
This, indeed, was a somewhat selfish satisfaction. Yet the merchant need
not quit nor be ashamed of his profession, bearing in mind only the
inscription on the Church of St. Giacomo de Rialto at Venice: "Around this
temple let the merchant's law be just, his weight true, and his covenants
faithful." [2]
If life has been sacrificed to the rolling up of money for its own sake,
the very means by which it was acquired will prevent its being enjoyed;
the chill of poverty will have entered into the very bones. The term Miser
was happily chosen for such persons; they are essentially miserable.
"A collector peeps into all the picture shops of Europe for a landscape of
Poussin, a crayon sketch of Salvator; but the Transfiguration, the Last
Judgment, the Communion of St. Jerome, and what are as transcendent as
these, are on the walls of the Vatican, the Uffizi, or the Louvre, where
every footman may see them: to say nothing of Nature's pictures in every
street, of sunsets and sunrises every day, and the sculpture of the human
body never absent.
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