Wealth & Money Quote by John Dryden

Dryden aims his blade at the most socially approved kind of moral failure: the respectable grind that turns a life into a balance sheet. The opening, "Go miser go", sounds like a mock benediction, as if greed were a vocation blessed by custom. That imperative keeps tightening the screw, pushing the miser onward with the same mechanical momentum that money itself demands. The real insult isn’t that the miser loves cash; it’s that he accepts money’s terms: "sell your soul", reduce everything to exchange, "Trade wares for wares", until even movement becomes drudgery - "trudge from pole to pole". The geography is cartoonishly global because the hunger is: accumulation as a worldview, a theology with no sabbath.

The subtext is about legacy, and Dryden makes it sting by showing how legacy talk launders cruelty. The miser’s imagined epitaph - "See what a vast estate he left his son" - is bluntly transactional, the kind of praise that can be spoken by neighbors who never had to live with him. Dryden’s irony is that society will reward the outcome (a fat inheritance) while ignoring the cost (a hollowed life). The son becomes both excuse and alibi: greed recast as duty.

Context matters: Restoration England is building modern finance, colonial trade, and a newly audible merchant class. Dryden, a poet in a culture renegotiating what counts as honor, skewers the moment when virtue starts getting measured in property. The lines work because they don’t moralize from on high; they ventriloquize the very applause that keeps the miser marching.