[1] See Rambler 110 and Note.  Read also the splendid passage on monastic
    seclusion in Adventurer 127.  The recluses of the Certosa and
    Chartreuse forsook the world for abodes lordly as those of princes.

No. 53.  SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 1759.

TO THE IDLER.

Sir,

I have a wife that keeps good company.  You know that the word good varies its meaning according to the value set upon different qualities in different places.  To be a good man in a college, is to be learned; in a camp, to be brave; and in the city, to be rich.  By good company in the place which I have the misfortune to inhabit, we understand not only those from whom any good can be learned, whether wisdom or virtue; or by whom any good can be conferred, whether profit or reputation:—­good company is the company of those whose birth is high, and whose riches are great; or of those whom the rich and noble admit to familiarity.

I am a gentleman of a fortune by no means exuberant, but more than equal to the wants of my family, and for some years equal to our desires.  My wife, who had never been accustomed to splendour, joined her endeavours to mine in the superintendence of our economy; we lived in decent plenty, and were not excluded from moderate pleasures.

But slight causes produce great effects.  All my happiness has been destroyed by change of place:  virtue is too often merely local; in some situations the air diseases the body, and in others poisons the mind.  Being obliged to remove my habitation, I was led by my evil genius to a convenient house in a street where many of the nobility reside.  We had scarcely ranged our furniture, and aired our rooms, when my wife began to grow discontented, and to wonder what the neighbours would think, when they saw so few chairs and chariots at her door.

Her acquaintance, who came to see her from the quarter that we had left, mortified her without design, by continual inquiries about the ladies whose houses they viewed from our windows.  She was ashamed to confess that she had no intercourse with them, and sheltered her distress under general answers, which always tended to raise suspicion that she knew more than she would tell; but she was often reduced to difficulties, when the course of talk introduced questions about the furniture or ornaments of their houses, which, when she could get no intelligence, she was forced to pass slightly over, as things which she saw so often that she never minded them.

To all these vexations she was resolved to put an end, and redoubled her visits to those few of her friends who visited those who kept good company; and, if ever she met a lady of quality, forced herself into notice by respect and assiduity.  Her advances were generally rejected; and she heard them, as they went down stairs, talk how some creatures put themselves forward.

She was not discouraged, but crept forward from one to another; and, as perseverance will do great things, sapped her way unperceived, till, unexpectedly, she appeared at the card-table of lady Biddy Porpoise, a lethargick virgin of seventy-six, whom all the families in the next square visited very punctually when she was not at home.