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honesty or truth, who has the least feeling of worth within him, can have a fellow in him.

We often form an estimate of the minds of men, by bringing their characters home to the touch of our own hearts, and conceiving how we should feel, if we were of the same character. Now in this experiment an honest man feels hypocrisy to be so unnatural, that he wonders how a hypocrite can bear with himself, he must have so joyless a soul, so destitute of all the ease and freedom, which cheer and feed the heart, of all the generous and pleasant sympathies of man. Freedom is the bliss of man; to have the body enchained is dreadful, but to enchain the soul, and voluntarily to enchain it, argues a debasement below which human nature cannot sink. Yet such is the hypocrite. He is, in his soul as well as in his body, self-fettered, self-enslaved. But the profligate may have many pleasant and inviting traits about him, and be accessible to many of the cheerful and even

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virtuous

virtuous intercourses of society. In his ge. neral course of profligacy he has many intervals, in which he can resume the man, and the fellow-man. But the hypocrite is always the hypocrite; he has no forgetfulness of himself, unless when gross sensuality seduces him, to which hypocrites are singu larly prone. In proportion as the heart is starved, the body must be fed. This has been strikingly verified in the character of the monkish orders, whose gross sensuality and debaucheries were notorious; nor are the sour religionists of the present day and of the protestant class by any means free from this imputation. Though they return not with a smile the smiles of man, they meet the luxuries of the table with an ardour surpassed by few; and they are sorely belied, if they have not an equal relish for other animal indulgences, which are chastened and associated with virtue only in dignified minds. I have read or heard of an ecclesiastic of this severe evangelical class, as it is affectedly called, who by a con

stant

stant face and style of odorous sanctity, as if he was utterly abstracted from the world, was considered as an absolute saint by his people. On his death-bed, the conscience of this holy man broke through the restraints in which it had been held, and brought to his view many secret transgressions, which the world knew not: he was alarmed; he could not conceal his fears; he shrunk from the real approach of that other world, to which in spirit he wasthought to have been long removed; his surrounding friends were astonished, they wondered that so holy a man could have any apprehension of his future fate. Ah! cried he, but I have been sly!-True religion looks to God more than man, when it dresses and tricks itself out for man, more than suspicion attaches to it.-I beg pardon, gentlemen. I have been carried by the current of my subject further than I had proposed. But I recover myself, and will adduce examples from a very different class

VOL. II.

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class to illustrate my observation, that hypocrisy chills the heart, and, opening not even to the innocent pleasantries of life, is in its very nature repulsive and disgustful, while the libertine, heavy as his account is, may still have some of the sympathies of the heart, and mix with man in the courtesies and charities of life.-A more subtle and designing hypocrite than Tiberius we do not read of, and he had a heart not only cold and dead to all generous feeling, but which had absolutely revolted to pure cruelty, to a delight in spectacles of cruelty the most horrid and appalling. This monster, separated from all the common joys of man, had nothing to relieve the gloomy solitude, to which from his aversion to man, and the aversion of man to him, he had condemned himself, but sensuality; and to this he abandoned himself with a grossness, which one would hardly think was in human nature. The account which both Tacitus and Suetonius have given of his debaucheries

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baucheries and sensualities is too horrid even for a male ear, at least I will not venture the experiment. Such was the degeneracy, to which a gloomy hypocrisy reduced this sovereign of the Roman empire. He was not without abilities, which well-directed might have gained him honour; but tainted early by the designing spirit of his mother, and naturally inclined to jealousy and suspicion, reserve and dissimulation became the systematic policy of a mind never raised to true grandeur, and, mixed with other dark colours of his soul, terminated at last in a gloomy malignant misanthropy.

Lewis XI of France was almost the very counterpart of Tiberius. Change names, and you may suppose that you are reading the same history, except that he had more powerful enemies to encounter, who oftener called him forth into the view of man. But his policy was the same; a dark, selfish and malignant hypocrisy entered into