but let it be what it would, the honest gentleman bore it for many years
without a murmur, till at length, by repeated ill accidents of the kind, he
found it necessary to take the thing under consideration; and upon weighing
the whole, and summing it up in his mind, he found it not only
disproportioned to his other expences, but withal so heavy an article in
itself, as to disable him from any other act of generosity in his parish:
Besides this, he considered that with half the sum thus galloped away, he
could do ten times as much good;--and what still weighed more with him than
all other considerations put together, was this, that it confined all his
charity into one particular channel, and where, as he fancied, it was the
least wanted, namely, to the child-bearing and child-getting part of his
parish; reserving nothing for the impotent,--nothing for the aged,--nothing
for the many comfortless scenes he was hourly called forth to visit, where
poverty, and sickness and affliction dwelt together.

For these reasons he resolved to discontinue the expence; and there
appeared but two possible ways to extricate him clearly out of it;--and
these were, either to make it an irrevocable law never more to lend his
steed upon any application whatever,--or else be content to ride the last
poor devil, such as they had made him, with all his aches and infirmities,
to the very end of the chapter.

As he dreaded his own constancy in the first--he very chearfully betook
himself to the second; and though he could very well have explained it, as
I said, to his honour,--yet, for that very reason, he had a spirit above
it; choosing rather to bear the contempt of his enemies, and the laughter
of his friends, than undergo the pain of telling a story, which might seem
a panegyrick upon himself.

I have the highest idea of the spiritual and refined sentiments of this