That our Happiness must not be judged by the outward Appearance

Those who judge a man by his outward bearing and the ornaments of his fortune may often find themselves greatly mistaken. Antigonus spoke to one of his soldiers who had the reputation of being very valiant, and observed him to be pale and thin; he gave him a physician to look after him, and when he was recovered from his illness, found him much less bold in battle. He asked him what had changed his courage, and the soldier confessed it was the weakness itself that had made him venture so freely — since he had so little regard for a life that was a burden to him.

The show of riches and great estates gives a kind of credit to those who carry them; but within these gorgeous houses there are often men consumed by worry, gnawed by ambition, sick with resentment. The lord of a great domain may not sleep as well as the peasant beneath his window. Fortune has done much for the one and little for the other in visible things; in invisible things the account may read differently.

“We should not judge who has the better of it in the inside by what appears in the outside.”

I myself had need to learn this lesson early. I was long deceived by the grandeur of certain men I met, imagining that their settled bearing must proceed from settled happiness within. But gravity may be a mask, and dignity a disguise; the calmest looking men I have known have sometimes turned out to be the most tormented. The surface tells very little about the depths.

This is not a counsel of envy of the lowly, nor of contempt for the great. It is simply a counsel of accuracy. We cannot know what a man’s life is like from the carriage of his body or the cut of his coat; we can only know it, and then imperfectly, from long and intimate acquaintance. All other judgments are hasty, and most of them are wrong.