From Robinson Crusoe, Chapter I:
My father, a wise and grave man, gave me serious and excellent counsel
against what he foresaw was my design. He called me one morning into his
chamber, where he was confined by the gout, and expostulated very warmly with
me upon this subject. He asked me what reasons, more than a mere wandering
inclination, I had for leaving father's house and my native country, where I
might be well introduced, and had a prospect of raising my fortune by
application and industry, with a life of ease and pleasure. He told me it was
men of desperate fortunes on one hand, or of aspiring, superior fortunes on the
other, who went abroad upon adventures, to rise by enterprise, and make
themselves famous in undertakings of a nature out of the common road; that
these things were all either too far above me or too far below me; that mine
was the middle state, or what might be called the upper station of low life,
which he had found, by long experience, was the best state in the world, the
most suited to human happiness, not exposed to the miseries and hardships, the labour and sufferings of the mechanic part of mankind, and
not embarrassed with the pride, luxury, ambition, and envy of the upper part of
mankind. He told me I might judge of the happiness of this state by this one
thing-viz. that this was the state of life which all
other people envied; that kings have frequently lamented the miserable
consequence of being born to great things, and wished they had been placed in
the middle of the two extremes, between the mean and the great; that the wise
man gave his testimony to this, as the standard of felicity, when he prayed to
have neither poverty nor riches.
He bade me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life
were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind, but that the middle
station had the fewest disasters, and was not exposed to so many vicissitudes
as the higher or lower part of mankind; nay, they were not subjected to so many
distempers and uneasinesses, either of body or mind,
as those were who, by vicious living, luxury, and extravagances on the one
hand, or by hard labour, want of necessaries, and
mean or insufficient diet on the other hand, bring distemper upon themselves by
the natural consequences of their way of living; that the middle station of
life was calculated for all kind of virtue and all kind of enjoyments; that
peace and plenty were the handmaids of a middle fortune; that temperance,
moderation, quietness, health, society, all agreeable diversions, and all
desirable pleasures, were the blessings attending the middle station of life;
that this way men went silently and smoothly through the world, and comfortably
out of it, not embarrassed with the labours of the
hands or of the head, not sold to a life of slavery for daily bread, nor
harassed with perplexed circumstances, which rob the soul of peace and the body
of rest, nor enraged with the passion of envy, or the secret burning lust of
ambition for great things; but, in easy circumstances, sliding gently through
the world, and sensibly tasting the sweets of living, without the bitter;
feeling that they are happy, and learning by every day's experience to know it
more sensibly,