honorable to preside in a seminary of learning and form the future statemen, orators and heroes who were to govern and adorn the world, than to take an individual part in the political concerns of any. country; hence he declined the various splendid offers of preferment which were made him, courted peace and science in the school of Crotona, and won immortality by the wisdom of his course. ad and strive to Remember thing precepts of the Old-Batchelor, Alas! it is too true: I can no longer hide the melancholy fact, even from myself: I am, indeed, an Old Bachelor. Yet let not the confession deprive me of a single reader; for my fate is not a voluntary one; if it were, I should look for neglect, because I should feel that I deserved it. But let the reader believe the assurance, which, on farther acquaintance, I flatter myself, he will not doubt; that no narrow and sordid cast of character, no selfish love of solitude and silence, no frost of the spirit, nor (what is more frequent) habits of low and groveling vice, have kept me so long a bachelor. No, gentle and friendly reader; I am a bachelor, as Moliere's Mock Doctor was a physician; in spite of myself. For the last five and twenty years of my life, I have not failed to dispute this point of dying a bachelor, once a year, with some charming woman or other but as in every case the lady was both judge and party, I fared as it might have been expected; I lost my suit. Nor let my ill success be ascribed to any fickless or petulance on my part; for I never changed tobject more than once a year, nor desisted until I had ma rebuff for every season in it. This last rule of conduct i'adopted B for philosophical reason for although I knew that, in general, May was the mother of love, yet I knew, also, that the sex was not so mere a thermometer as to deend, entirely on the weather: I knew that the peculiar cast of character had much to do with this business; and that although it might, in some cases, require the genial ray of spring or the more fervid one of summer to touch 'the consecrated snow that lies on Dian's lap,' yet that in others, the same approach of the sun might volatilize and dissipate the character beyond the point of steady thought and feeling. Hence I followed and watched my reigning fair one, through every sign in the zodiac, with all the assiduity and enthusiasm of an astronomer, but without ever having, once, had the felicity to observe a conjunction. I have tried every age from fifteen to forty; and every com→ plexion from the Italian Brunette, to the dazzling and transparent white of Circassia. Nor let it be supposed that I have gone about this, as a matter of business; as if actuated merely by a cold and formal sense of duty. On the contrary, I think I can truly affirm that there never beat in the bosom of man a heart more alive, than mine, to all that is charming in woman. Indeed, it is to this excess of feeling and the officious, awkward and fatiguing anxiety of manners which it generates, that I charge the ill success of my courtships. Yet few men have had a better opportunity than myself to gain the polished negligence so pleasing to women. The reader may not be displeased with a sketch of my life; he has, indeed, a right to know the man who addresses him, whether for the purpose of amusement or instruction; and I shall introduce myself to him, if he please, without reserve or apology. I am a native of Virginia; and lost my father at an age too young to retain any knowledge of him. In the year 1770, after having graduated at Princeton College, I travelled, by the indulgence of the best of mothers, over the whole of civilized and refined Europe; visited every court, associated with the first circles, and, what will appear strange to those who know me now, received a brilliant compliment on my address from the most polished nobleman that ever adorned a court. I returned to my native country in time to witness the opening of the war with Great Britain and to receive one ball in my hip and another in my shoulder at the battle of Brandywine. This put an end to my campaigning; for, ever since, I have been copelled to hobble on a cane and have been unable to lift any weight in my right hand, much heavier than my pen. My mother (who is now an angel in Heaven,) had taken it into her head, with that erring partiality which is so natural, so excusable and even so amiable in a parent, that there was something uncommon in my character and that I was formed to make a figure in some line or other. Not being able, however, to define to her own satisfaction in what the peculiar superiority of my mind consisted, nor consequently what the particular profession, was, in which I was destined to shine, she determined that I should try them all round, until the chord of genius should be struck; and, with this view, directed my first efforts to the profession of law. Her will was my law; and I knew no pleasure on earth equal to that of obeying it. I entered, therefore, at once, on the Herculean labor of the law and an Herculean one I made it; for having, early in life, adopted the maxim that "whatever is worth doing, is worth doing well," I took a route in the study suggested by my own judgment. Dissatisfied with the jejune course commonly pursued, and aspiring to something beyond mediocrity, I took the science from its basis, the law of nature; and raised upon it an unusual and most extensive superstructure of national and civil, as well as municipal law. But my success by no means corresponded with the preparation; for when I came to the bar of my county, I found that I was like a seventy-four-gun ship aground in a creek; while every pettifogger, with his canoe and paddle was able to glide around and get ahead of me. I found myself, in short, so entirely eclipsed by littleness, chicanery and sophistry, set off by a bold and confident front and a loud and voluble tongue, that having no necessity to continue the practice, I retired from it, I will not say, in disgust; but under a conviction, that the profession was an Augean stall which required cleansing, and that, to give it all its appropriate dignity and attraction, a fundamental reformation was indispensible. On this subject, the reader will hear farther from me, in the course of these papers: at present I return to my narrative. Having thus ascertained to my mother that the bar was not the theatre for which my stars designed me; having (not to disguise the matter) entirely failed in it, "rather" (as my indulgent and too partial parent was wont to say) "from the delicacy of my feelings, than any want of parts;" I entered at her desire, in the next place, on the study of physic. With this, as a study, I was in the highest degree, delighted. The subjects which it treatedthe curious structure and economy of the human system; the history of diseases, their remote and subtle symp toms, and the mode of ascertaining and combating them; the countless diversity of singular affections, mental and corporeal, with reports of which the books abounded; and the astonishing proofs of the sagacity of man in the various and beautiful theories proposed for explaining the causes of our maladies, and waging war against the king of terrorswere interesting to me beyond expression. I pursued the study not as labor, but con amore: and although I was somewhat advanced in age, and the mischievous wags, my fellow-students, in sly allusion to my former profession and my failure in it, used to greet me every morning when I entered the lecture room, with a mock-tragic bow and the L. L. D. and A. S. S. which have since made such a figure in the mouth of Doctor Pangloss; yet as they showed plainly enough, that they loved, & if necessary, would have shed their blood for me, I took it all in good part, and pressed on in my studies with unabated ardor. There were, however, two circumstances in this profession, that gave me great inquietude; the first was the multitude of miserable spectacles in the hospitals which were, daily, appealing to my sympathy; and the other, the extreme uncertainty of the remedies which were exhibited for their relief. On the first head, however, I was consoled by learning that I should soon become used to it, and grow callous to the touch of another's wce; and on the last, my vanity was flattered by being reminded of the scope which this uncertainty gave to genius, and the vast region of terra incognita, which thus courted the enterprize of the adventurer. The reader when he comes to know me, will believe that I was not much soothed or gratified by either of these prospects; the total extinction of my sympathies for my fellow man; 'or voyages of discovery to be made on seas of human blood. Still amused, however, with the science, and animated by the hope that it might qualify me in some cases to be of service to my fellow creatures, I pressed on to a diploma; and having obtained that and procured a supply of medicines, 1 returned to my parental estate to dispense the fruits of my studies. tors. Alas! my medical career was a very short one; for the first patient submitted to my skill, was my own beloved mother. Ah! how unavailing, how contemptible then appeared to me all the triumphs of the art: I called in my instrucIt was in vain; the disease gathered strength every hour, and I saw, distinctly, the approach of death. But I forget that I have no claim on the sympathy of the reader. She expired in my arms, and I was no longer a physician. The loss of such a parent, in such circumstances-whose |