Honor, Prudence and Pleasure took up together. Pleasure ruined the arrangement and was turned out except for holidays and other events.
Luxury is to property, what a plague is to health.
Northcote
Honour, Prudence, and Pleasure undertook to keep house together; Honour was to govern the family, Prudence to provide for it, and Pleasure to conduct its arrangements. For some time they went on exceedingly well, and with great propriety: but after a while, Pleasure getting the upper hand, began to carry mirth to extravagance, and filled the house with gay, idle, riotous company, and the consequent expenses threatened the ruin of the establishment; so that Honour and Prudence, finding it absolutely necessary to break up the partnership, determined to quit the house, and leave Pleasure to go on her own way, which did not continue long, as she soon brought herself to poverty, and came a begging to her former companions, Honour and Prudence, who had now settled together in another habitation. However they would never afterwards admit Pleasure to be a partner in their household, hut sent for her occasionally, on holidays, to make them merry, and in return they maintained her out of their alms.
Application
The wants of nature are few: it is the office of reason to regulate both the taste and the appetite; and those who are governed by her laws, will be enabled to leave their wealth, their health, and their example, rich endowments to their heirs.
All beyond enough is too much, all beyond nourishment is luxury, all beyond decency is extravagance. Intemperance has a smiling and alluring aspect, but a dreadful retinue; consisting of the whole assemblage of diseases, for death has been their cook, and has infused a slow poison into every sauce.
Luxury is to property, what a plague is to health; it is equally contagious, and equally destructive; it is the disease of which not only individuals, but the noblest monarchies, and most flourishing states have died, in consequence of which even the richest cities may be reduced to misery, and the posterity of its citizens become as poor as their earliest ancestors were; but without their continence, industry, or virtue.
Italian.
