cians, though we be not sensible of their ministry. Yet now that I strictly watch my sensations, methinks I feel one busy imp faintly tracing the outline of the abhorred crow's foot at the corner of my eye, which future urchins will gradually stamp in ineffaceable lines. Another is craftily indenting a wrinkle by the mouth, to be hereafter chiselled into a deep furrow; a third plucks out a single hair, the precursory theft to final baldness; a fourth is boring his gimblet through my most potential masticator-fatal prelude to tooth-ach and extraction! a fifth malignant, grinning spitefully in the consciousness of his superior powers of annoyance, is distilling the first drop of his bleaching liquid upon my whiskers; while a sixth yellow-faced tormentor, the master-devil of the whole pandemonium, has leaped clean down my throat, and is at this moment, with a ladle of melted butter in one hand and a drumstick of a goose in the other, concocting the ingredients of a bilious attack. Our face is a chronometer, revealing our age with a fearful punctuality. The hour-hand leaves its impress with every rotation; nay, the minute hand makes its mark, though it may not write legibly. Smiles and laughter turn up the ends of the lines and indentations, as melancholy drags them down, turning our sixes into nines, and so putting us forward fifty per cent. Can we desire a better argument for merriment ?

Alas! these are not the worst pranks of the horal legion, some of whose more subtle members fly from one chamber of the brain to another, muddying the current of clear thought, dulling the imagination, and

undermining the memory. One hoaxer, in particular, is ever prompting me to repeat the same joke which I have recounted to the same people twenty times before, and then bursts out a-laughing because nobody else does. And, lo! even now sits one of these mischievous spirits upon the top of my pen, mocking and mowing, and perforating the quill, that so the spirit of the goose, from whose wing it was plucked, may flow down to the nib. Hence, sensilising tribe! avaunt, ye piecemeal destroyers! Which of ye thus flutters at mine ear? Ah! your reproach is too true. I recall my words: pursue your tasks, most dainty dilapidators, for your successors will set to work with a still more unsparing hand.

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To-day has a triple claim to our consideration, for, besides its present appeal, it has been the future, and will be the past. He is wise, says an ancient philosopher, who lives to-day he is wiser still, exclaims his commentator, who lived yesterday. But what is the best mode of life for the attainment of happiness? This question has puzzled the philosophers of all ages. Pyrrho, denying the existence of any beatitude, maintained that life and death were alike; and when asked why he did not seek the latter, since the former was so little attractive, replied, "Because they are both indifferent to me." Croesus placed the chief good in riches; Periander of Corinth in honour; Socrates in knowledge; Plato in idea; Orpheus in beauty; Milo the Crotonian in bodily strength; Thales the Milesian in the union of prudence and knowledge; Pittacus in benevolence; Aristotle in the practice and

operation of virtue; and Epicurus affirms that happiness is the chief good, and virtue the only happiness. Confirming this last theory by the sanctions of religion, we shall probably make the nearest approaches to perfect enjoyment which our nature will admit; and it may be laid down as an universal maxim, that no mind is so constituted, as to be capable of unalloyed happiness while it can reproach itself with any crime towards man, however secret and undiscovered, since it must be always conscious of having offended a superior power, from which nothing is hidden.

The To-day of England, nationally considered, cannot be reckoned happy. It is too bustling, laborious, and excessive. In France pleasure is almost the only business; in England business is almost the only pleasure, and this is pushed to an extremity that surrounds it with hazard and anxiety. By devoting all its energies and faculties, physical and intellectual, t › this one object, for a series of years, the nation has attained an eminence so fearfully beyond its natura claims and position, that nothing but a continuance of convulsive efforts, even in the midst of distress and exhaustion, can enable it to uphold the rank it has assumed. Hence every thing is artificial, and in all directions we contemplate tension, excitement, fever. Her navy exceeds that of the collected world, so does her debt-a co-existence that cannot be very durable. Her establishments of all sorts are proportioned to what she owes, rather than to what she has; her deur can only be equalled by her embarrassments. In one colony she has sixty millions of subjects, while

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a great proportion of her native population are paupers, and in her sister-island famine not long since stalked hand-in-hand with rebellion. Nor have her intellectual developements been less extraordinary, for she possesses a constellation of living luminaries, who, pouring forth their streams of light with a profusion as unparalleled as their intensity, at this moment irradiate and supply all Europe. Splendid talents have excited public admiration, and procured unprecedented remuneration; while fame and riches have reacted upon the stimulated latent genius, until the existing literature of the country presents a universality of diffusion, an unbounded copiousness of production, and a magnificence of encouragement, hitherto totally unknown in the history of the world. No social system was ever pushed to such an energetic extremity, or afforded so curious and glorious a spectacle; but it has not sufficient repose for enjoyment: happiness loves to dwell amid more tranquil elements. Its tendency has been painfully illustrated by the fate of some of its leading members. Unable or unwilling to relax in their career, they have devoted mind and body to this restless principle of advancement, and have toiled and prospered, and become enslaved and enriched, and achieved misery and fame, until nature was exhausted in the strife, and their own hands relieved them from the burden of existence at the precise moment when they had attained every object of their ambition, and appeared to the world to stand upon the summit of human happiness. How long is this fearful tension upon all the nerves and sinews of the

country to endure? What is to be the result of this overworking of the national machine? A certain Frenchman implored death to spare him till he saw the end of the French Revolution-so curious was he to witness its termination. An Englishman might well petition to be absolved from the omnivorous scythe, until he ascertained what would be the finale of the present ecstasy of his country.

Those individuals who seek happiness will withdraw themselves from this whirl and vortex of excitement. They will not aggravate the diseased enlargement of the public heart, and share the painful intensity of its pulsations, by residing in the capital. There is no holy calm, no sabbath of the soul, no cessation of strife, in that vast arena of the passions, where life is a ceaseless struggle of money-getting and money-spending; a contest of avarice and luxury; a delirium of the senses or of the mind. If we desire peace and repose, let us look out upon the variegated earth, ever new and ever beautiful-upon the azure dome of Heaven, hung around with painted clouds-upon the wide waters, dancing and glittering in the sun, or lying in the stillness of their crystal sleep. Let us listen to the music of the sky, when the boughs are singing to the wind, and the birds are serenading one another; or surrender ourselves to that more pleasing sensation, when the serenity of Nature's silence imparts a congenial balm and tranquillity to the heart. Gazing upon the face of Nature, we shall encounter no human passions, no distrust, no jealousy, no intermission of friendship or attraction; even her frowns are beauti