fects, and desist if we find Alfred's hopes likely to be frus trated, or Galen's fears to be realized." Rosalie's vote, supported by her own and Alfred's arguments, at once determined me, and I commenced the work. How long it may continue, will depend more upon my readers than myself; upon their tractability and submission to my authority, as well as the candor and justice with which they shall treat my motives. Number IV. Satin' parva res est voluptatum in vita, Præquam quod molestum'st! ita cuique comparátum Ita Dis est placitum, voluptatem at mæror comes con sequatur; Quin incommodi plus malique ilies adsit, boni ei obtigit quid. Plaut. in Amphitr. Act II, Scene Compar'd with all its sorrows, cares and strife, The Gods decree it-and our sighs are vain- Yet give me still, ye Gods, more sorrows, cares and So that ye, also, give th' enchanting joys of life. It is but a desponding and poor-spirited account of human life that Pliny, the elder, has given, and very unworthy, I think, of so great a Philosopher. For after a mournful dirge, in which he contrasts the infirmities and miseries of man, with the superior advantages and enjoyments of brutes, he cites a sentiment which he represents as common in his day, that it would be best for a man not to be born or to die quickly and to shew that these sentiments were not the capricious effusions of the moment, he asserts in another book, that the greatest blessing which God has bestowed upon men, amongst so many pains and troubles of life, is the power of killing themselves. How much more just as well as beautiful the view which Seneca has taken of the subject: when, after casting his eyes up to the Heavens and around upon the earth, surveying the countless variety of objects that have been formed to entertain and regale us, and contemplating the hen had perfect capacities for enjoyment, sensual as well as lectual, that have been bestowed upon man, he breaks ent into the finest strain of eloquence, and calls upon his rea der to say whether Heaven has not provided not only for his subsistence, but even for his luxury, and that with the most unsparing hand, the most profuse munificence! This feast, however, of the senses and mind, depends for its enjoyment, like every other feast, on the health and appetite with which we sit down to it; and this health and appetite (unfortunately for us, as we manage it,) depend in a very great degree on ourselves. I do not pretend that any exertion, on our part, will always ensure us a zest for this banquet; because sickness and sorrow, the common lot of humanity, will have their turn; and tinge, for a time, the whole creation with melancholy: but what I say is, that far the greater part of the niseries as well as misfortunes of which people complain, is purely and entirely their own work. Look at the character of those people, who most frequently make this complaint of the load of hife-how rarely will you hear it from innocence and active industry? How often from indolence, dissipation and vice? Peace must begin at home. He who receives from his own heart, when he first awakes in the morning, the salutation of an approving smile, will, when he rises and goes forth, see all nature smile around him; while the wretch, whose interrupted slumber is broken by the gnawings of remorse or the pangs of guilt, will see the image of his own internal trouble and horror reflected from every object that meets his view. But how are we to secure this morning salute of a smile? This question was answered for me by a peasant in Switzerland, when I visited that country in 1772. I could not help being struck, on my first entrance into it, with the picture of national happiness which every where presented itself. Wherever I turned, I heard the hum of cheerful industry-wherever I looked, I saw the glow of health and smile of content. If I entered a town, I heard, on every hand, the rattling of the hammer and clinking of the trowel, bearing witness to the progress of wealth and population: If I sauntered into the country, I heard the rosy daughters of industry, singing aloud to their spinning wheels; or saw them engaged in that sweetest occupation of primeval innocence, pruning and dressing their luxariant vines and teaching the young tendrils how to shoot; if I climbed a mountain, I saw it animated, from its base to its summit, with a sprightly flock, that seemed to be conpious of the general happiness of the country, and to par 20 fects, and trated, skipping from rock to rock, with astonishing de suppor and browzing briskly and cheerfully, on the scanty terductions of the soil; while their shepherd master, with mais alp-horn to his lips and peace and gladness at his heart, poured from the echoing mountains into the valley that smiled below, the simply wild and touching notes of his favorite air, the rans des vaches. Affected, almost to tears of pleasure by this finished scene of earthly happiness, as I stood looking at it, from the cottage door of a venerable old peasant; I asked him how it happened, that in a climate so little favored by natare, and the far greater part of whose soil was surren dered to mountains and hopeless sterility, I witnessed all this peace, all this content, all this glowing, smiling happiness? "The answer is very short and easy," said this rural philosopher, pleased with the interest which he saw in my face; all that you see is the effect of industry, protected and not incumbered by government; for industry is the mother of virtue and health, and these are the parents of happiness; as idleness is the mother of vice and disease, the immediate parents of human misery. Behold the whole secret of the health, innocence and peace of Switzerland!" Accordingly when I passed on to Italy, blessed as that country is with the finest climate that ever indulgent Heaven shed upon the earth, and crowned withr every beauty and every luxury that can feast the eye, the ear, the taste, or gratify the mind of man, I heard the nobles, in the palaces of marble and on their sofas of silk, complaining of their stars," in holyday terms," and exclaiming against the hard condition of human life! and when I got to England, that boasted land of roast beef and October, of liberty and plenty, I found the loungers pretty much of Pliny's opinion; that the privilege of killing themselves was the greatest, if not the only blessing, that Heaven had bestowed on men: a privilege which they accordingly claimed, and exercised, whenever their mo rey, the sinews of vice, gave out, or their guilty pleasures came to pall upon the sense. Every thing that I have observed while abroad, as well as at home, has served to confirm the philosophy of the peasant of Switzerland. Insomuch that wherever I see the native bloom of health and the genuine smile of content, I mark down the character as industrious and virtuous and I never yet failed to have the prepossession confirmed on enquiry. So on the other hand, wherever I see pale repining and languid discontent; and hear complaints uttered against the hard lot of humanity, my first impression is, that the character from whom they proceed 18 indolent, or vicious, or both; and I have not often had occasion to retract the opinion. There is, indeed, a class of characters, rather indolent than vicious, who are really to be pitied; whose innocent and captivating amusements, becoming at length their sole pursuits, tend only to whet their sensibility to misfortunes, which they contribute to bring on; and to form pictures of life so highly aggravated as to render life itself, stale and flat. Of this cast was the immortal Homer; who has the credit of having first advanced the opinion which Pliny has so much amplified, that in human life, the sum of evil far exceeds that of good. It is not wonderful that Homer should have advanced such a sentiment, if we may confide in any of the ancient accounts of him, which have been handed down to us; more especially in that circumstantial one which is ascribed to Herodotus. According to these accounts, he was the offspring of an illicit amour, never recognised by his father, and in his childhood, dependant on a mother who had to support herself and him by manual labor. Arrived at years of maturity, he at first taught a school, and afterwards wandered about Greece, in the character of a rhapsodist, (somewhat analagous to the bard or minstrel of ancient Britain,) singing his poems at great men's houses, and subsisting on their precarious bounty. During this vagrant life, he was supported for a considerable time at the house of a leather-dresser; and having, by repeated attacks of a defluxion in his eyes, entirely lost his sight, and remained blind for several years, he at length died, a wanderer, and was buried in the sands of the sea shore. Compare these disastrous and humiliating events with the character of the man; that tender and dissolving sensibility which beams with such irresistible effect from every part of his works; which drew the parting of Hector and Andromache, aħd the no less pathetic meeting of Ulysses and Penelope; compare his own poverty and mortifications with that geBius which was for ever representing to him characters and life on their grandest and noblest scale, and will you see any cause to wonder at Homer's estimate of human life? Those who have succeeded this Prince of poets, in his profession, have resembled him much more in their poverty, misery and consequent estimate of life, than in sublimity of genius and immortality of works. But against the opinion of these men, we have that of Socrates, pronounced by the oracle of Delphos, to be the wisest man of the age in which he lived; of Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, and an ancient poet, as eminent for dramatic composition as Homer was for epic; I mean Euripi des, who after citing the opinion of Homer, advances the exact reverse of it, and supports himself by an argument which has been termed inspiration. In proof of the generality of this latter opinion, too, we have the whole prac tice of antiquity; for they held suicide to be no crime; and if they really believed the evil of life to surpass the good, how did it happen that they did not get rid of it ?— that, on the contrary, with the prolocutor whom Plautus introduces in my motto, they were guilty, of the practical sclecism of voluntarily sustaining the greater evil for the sake of the trivial good? Yet the very men who have most distinguished themselves by this opinion of the preponderance of evil, were those who seem to have cleaved to life with the fondest pertinacity. Thus Homer, in spite of poverty, blindness and misery, lingered on to a very advanced age, and fell at last, not by his own hand, but the reluctant hand of nature: Ovid, another advocate of this opinion, as might well have been expected from his lewd course of life, sustained the ordinary evils increased by exile; yet, overloaded with calamity, as he affected to think this state of being, like some of the lovers we meet with in the Operas, he chose the moment of misfortune to break out into a song, and chaunted away, to the day of his death, with so much ease, and melody, and grace and on subjects too so light and airy, that it is as difficult to believe him sincere in his complaints, as it is to believe the lover in the Opera. As to Pliny, although he held death to be the greatest of blessings, yet he practised, in this respect, all the abstinence of a philosophier; and fled from the eruption of Vesuvius which destroyed him, with as much precipitation as if he had really thought death the greatest of evils. Lucretius is the only advocate of that opinion who abridged his life; and in him, if we may believe his his torians, it was not the effect of reason and calculation, but of long-standing and confirmed insanity. In this class of victims to a busy indolence, next to those who devote their whole lives to the unprofitable business of writing works of imagination, are those who spend the whole of their's in reading them. There are several men and women of this description in the circle of my acquaintance: persons, whose misfortune it is to be released from the salutary necessity of supporting themselves by their own exertions, and who vainly seek happiness in intellectual dissipation. Bianca is one of the finest girls in the whole round of iny acquaintance, and is now one of the happiest. But >hen I first became acquainted with her, which was about |