328 ROBINSON CRUSOE.

to be legally married ; bo!h which were happily brought about
afterwards by my means, or at least in consequence of my
coming among them,

Having thus given an account of the colony in general, and
pretty much of my runagate English, I must say something of
the Spaniards, who were the iain body of the family, and ia
whose story there are some incidents also remarkable enough.

I had a great many discourses, with them about their cir-
cumstances when they were among the savages. They told me
readily that they had no instances to give of their application
or ingenuity in that country ; that they were a poor, miserable,
dejected handful of people; that if means had been put into
their hands, yet they had so abandoned themselves to despair,
and so sunk under the weight of their misfortune, that they
thought of nothing but starving. One of them, a grave and
sensible man, told me he was convinced they werein the wrong ;
that it was not the part of wise men to give themselves up to
their misery, but always to take hold of the helps which reason
offered, as well for present support as for future deliverance :
he told me that grief was the most senseless, insignificant
passion in the world, for that it regarded only things past, which
were generally impossible to be recalled, or to be remedied, but
had no views of things to come, and had no share in anything
that looked like deliverance, but rather added to the affliction
than proposed a remedy ; and upon this he repeated a Spanish
proverb, which though I cannot repeat in just the same words
that he spoke it in, yet I remember I made it into an English
proverb of my own, thus :—

In trouble to be troubled,
Is to have your trouble doubled,

He ran on then in remarks upon all the little improvements
I had made in my solitude ; my unwearied application, as he
called it; and how I had made a condition, which in its circum-
stances was at first much worse than theirs, a thousand times
more happy than theirs was, even now when they were all
together. He told me it was remarkable that Englishmen had
a greater presence of mind, in their distress, than anv people
that ever he met with; that their unhappy nation and the Por-
tuguese were the worst men in the world to struggle with mis-
fortunes ; for that their first step in dangers, after the common
efforts were over, was to despair, lie down under it, and die,
without rousing their thoughts up to proper remedies fox
escape.