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THE

LOUNGER.

No. 1. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 1785.

J'y goûte avec plaisir

Les charmes peu connus d'un innocent Loisir:
Toujours occupé sans avoir rien à faire.

DESTOUCHES.

NOTHING is perhaps so difficult as to find out business proper for the idle; and, though it may appear paradoxical, yet I believe none have so much need of it as they. The man who is professionally employed, in whatever department, goes on in the track which habit has marked out for him, at peace with his own thoughts and the world; but he whom every passing moment reproaches with doing nothing, must often fly for relief to very useless or very unworthy occupations. He will often be dissipated without amusement, and intemperate without pleasure, merely because dissipation is preferable to vacancy, and intemperance to listlessness.

There is however a kind of men, whom accident has thrown out of the business of life, and whom temperament, if not virtue, keeps out of the dissipation of it, who hold a station of less destructive and more dignified indolence, whom the company of their

VOL. I.

B

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