614 “MY MIND TO ME A KINGDOM IS.”

world could do for us: and though the greatness, the authority,
the riches, and the pleasures which some enjoyed in the world, and
which he had enjoyed his share of, had much in them that was
agreeable to us, yet, he observed, that all those things chiefly
gratified the coarsest of our affections, such as our ambition, our
particular pride, our avarice, our vanity, and our sensuality; all
which were, indeed, the mere product of the worst part of man,
were in themselves crimes, and had in them the seeds of all manner
of crimes, but neither were related to, or concerned with, any of
those virtues that constituted us wise men, or of those graces which
distinguished us as Christians: that being now deprived of all the
fancied felicity which he enjoyed in the full exercise of all those
vices, he said he was at leisure to look upon the dark side of them,
where he found all manner of deformity; and was now convinced
that virtue only makes a man truly wise, rich, and great, and pre-
serves him in the way to a superior happiness in a future state,
And in this, he said, they were more happy in their banishment,
than all their enemies were, who had the full possession of all
the wealth and power that they (the banished) had left behind
them.

“Nor, sir,” says he, “ do I bring my mind to this politically, by
the necessity of my circumstances, which some call miserable; but
if I know anything of myself, I would not now go back, though
the czar, my master, should call me, and reinstate me in all my
former grandeur—I say, I would no more go back to it, than [
believe my soul, when it shall be delivered from this prison of the
body, and has had a taste of the glorious state beyond life, would
come back to the gaol of flesh and blood it is now enclosed in, and
leave heaven to deal in the dirt and grime of human affairs.”

He spoke this with so much warmth in his temper, so much
earnestness and motion of his spirits, which were apparent in hia
countenance, that it was evident it was the true sense of his soul.
There was no room to doubt his sincerity.

I told him, I once thought myself a kind of a monarch in my old
station, of which I had given him an account, but that I thought
he wag not a monarch only, but a great conqueror; for that he
that has got a victory over his own exorbitant desires, and has the