, he found himself possessed of no more than between three and four hundred pounds.

Thus were overthrown all our projector's hopes! which, though they certainly were a system of reform utterly beyond his ability to mature, yet he surely merited no reproach for having made such a laudable attempt.
As I have already observed, there never was perhaps an instance of a well-disposed young man who was in so trying a way let alone entirely to the bent of his own disposition. That disposition evidently led him to alleviate the wants of his fellow creatures. If in this he aimed at more than he could accomplish, let it be attributed to a liberal, expanded propensity to confer benefits; a noble, giving, beneficent principle of action, which must be endowed in an uncommon degree with courageous generosity, to risk, in supplying the wants of others, the existence of that source from which those wants were supplied.
As to the vehicles through which this benevolence was dispensed, they certainly wanted riper experience, more consequence, and a larger fund to manage them; for, as it was, our hero's conduct—especially as to his two first schemes—was a sort of Quixotism in liberality. But yet, had the folly been ten times more egregious, it was still but folly; whereas the intention in so young a man, so

unadvised, so left to his own propensities, requires a word to express its deserts much stronger than any dictionary will give us, and which one might have an idea of by fancying—if one could do so without violating language—something that implied a meaning about ten times as expressive as the superlative degree of admirable.
Nine out of ten however reviled Charles's conduct in the most humiliating terms. He had a hundred nick names. He was the infant Hercules; the mad projector; the opulent beggar; the beneficent catchpole; Timon in tatters; and ninety-five other things, all as good as these. But in the midst of this, it must have mortified his enemies to death, and raised the praise of all good men to that very unspeakable degree of admiration I mentioned in the last paragraph, had they accompanied the gradual decline of his circumstances with remarks on his becoming conduct, and then seen how he sat himself down in adversity!
When first he returned to England, he had an elegant house, and kept his carriage. The moment he was out of parliament, he sold off his carriage, took a smaller house, and lived more privately; till, step by step, we now see him only decently lodged, with an old gentlewoman,