Page:Table-Talk (1821).djvu/275

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ON THOUGHT AND ACTION.
263

solid gold, and lifts the mind quite off its ordinary hinges. The account of the manner in which the founder of Guy’s Hospital accumulated his immense wealth has always to me something romantic in it, from the same force of contrast. He was a little shop-keeper, and out of his savings, bought Bibles and purchased seamen’s tickets in Queen Anne’s wars, by which he left a fortune of two hundred thousand pounds. The story suggests the idea of a magician; nor is there any thing in the Arabian Nights that looks more like a fiction.