Such we have often seen
rising in the morning to cards, and retiring in the afternoon to doze,
whose happiness was celebrated by their neighbours, because they
happened to grow rich by parsimony, and to be kept quiet in
insensibility, and agreed to eat and to sleep together.
We have both mingled with the world, and are therefore no strangers to
the faults and virtues, the designs and competitions, the hopes and
fears of our contemporaries. We have both amused our leisure with books,
and can therefore recount the events of former times, or cite the
dictates of ancient wisdom. Every occurrence furnishes us with some hint
which one or the other can improve, and if it should happen that memory
or imagination fail us, we can retire to no idle or unimproving
solitude.
Though our characters, beheld at a distance, exhibit this general
resemblance, yet a nearer inspection discovers such a dissimilitude of
our habitudes and sentiments, as leaves each some peculiar advantages,
and affords that _concordia discors_, that suitable disagreement which
is always necessary to intellectual harmony. There may be a total
diversity of ideas which admits no participation of the same delight,
and there may likewise be such a conformity of notions as leaves neither
any thing to add to the decisions of the other.
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