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representation of fellow beings affected. We suffer to a certain extent in their sufferings. It cannot be supposed that exhibitions of misery are in themselves grateful; that sobs and groans regale our ears, and spectacles of woe feast our eyes. If this ever happen with any, it must be with those only, who are under the operation of the most dark and malignant passions. Yet experience and observation prove, that men in general have some disposition to converse with misfortune, and find a pleasure in being moved with objects of distress. I shall remark on the fact,and the cause; shall sketch the natural history of our sensibility to the sufferings of others; and trace the origin of the pleasure apparently found in compassionate, sympathetick feelings, excited by the presence or the representation of human beings in situations difficult, trying, and calamitous.

The expressions, we have recited, have respect to our sympathies with distress, real or imagined. It is believed to be a law of our mental frame, that in certain circum- The aptitude to be moved by stances we shall derive pleasure the emotions, and to suffer with from affecting objects and repre- the sufferings of our fellow beings, sentations. The origin of this is expressed in a variety of terms pleasure has been a subject of spe- and phrases. It is called rejoicing culation; for curiosity is necessa- with those who rejoice, and weeprily interested to disentangle it ing with those who weep. Symfrom its apparent complications; pathy is used to indicate the state and the moral character of human of our feelings, when we enter innature is in some measure involv- to their painful sensations. We ed in the result of the inqui- are inclined to feel for all that feels, ry. The Remarker invites his or that is intimately associated with readers to join him in a brief ex- what is sensitive. An inanimate amination of this part of our con- object is regarded with interest stitution. They may find that on account of its connexion with light is reflected from one of the something animated. A staff, dark sides of our nature; and see which has been long a companion a new proof of benevolence in the of our walks, is prized with a senauthor of our frame; who has timent like affection. A dwelling, placed an ally of the unfortunate which has been a home, the seat in the strong holds of self-love, of our best enjoyments, is forsaken and ordained that pleasure shall with regret. Ruins, are objects of be raised from the bosom of un- sentiment, calling back the mind casiness.' to the days of other years, and We are affected at the sight or seeming conscious to the actions

of the mighty dead. The power of strong passion to convert things inanimate into sympathising beings, is evinced by the personifications of poetry. In elegiack verses the trees, and fountains, and rocks are described as sharing the griefs, which the muse bewails. Few persons are wholly indifferent to the sufferings of the brute creation. The joy of the chase, celebrated with so much enthusiasm in hunting songs, is not espoused by the pitiful so strongly, as the fear and anguish of the animal flying from its pursuers. Many an eye has been moistened at the catastrophe of the high mettled racer,' and all readers of Virgil and Lucretius enter with fellow feeling into those passages, where they describe, the one the sorrow of a steer for the loss of his fellow, and the other the affliction of a cow deprived of her calf.* The dead, considered as cut off from every agreeable appearance of nature, every loved connexion of life, and shut up in the cold and dreary tomb, are viewed with pity, though reflection teaches us that these sad associations exist only in our minds. We feel for those, who are insensible to the circumstances that raise our emotion. The dubious prospects of the unconscious infant, deprived of its parents; the gaiety of the maniack, 'laughing wild,' excite compassion. The sympathy, of which we are treating, is the fellow feeling, which we have with a being like ourselves, in situations of distress or under painful perturbations of mind. We are said to harmonise with his condition and feelings; to make his sensations in a greater or less degree our own; to adopt his emotions. We see, hear, or im

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agine his misery, and our souls are attuned to correspondent vibrations.

The mode, the expressions, the degree, and the attractiveness of this sympathy, are diversified by a multitude of causes within and without us. The effect is much determined by the manner,in which the suffering is presented to our attention; whether by sight, by the report of an eye-witness, by the plain narrative of the historian, or the high-wrought fiction of the novelist; whether it appear in the tones of musick, in painting, sculpture, and statuary; in the descriptions of poetry, the pathetick addresses of eloquence, or in dramatick writings and exhibitions. In the efforts of art to raise emotion the success must vary with the skill and dexterity, which are exerted; and depends on the conformity of the characters, the incidents,the sentiments,and language; the intonations, looks, gestures, and attitudes to nature and truth. Numerous other circumstances are known to influence the direction and force of the sympathetick affections. The activity of the imagination, and sensibility of the heart, and delicacy of the temperament, are concerned in the impression made by scenes of woe. Some persons are too stupid to comprehend any sorrows, but their own. They witness and learn disasters with serenity undisturbed,as Dutchmen hear of earthquakes in Calabria.' This dullness of the imagination, which feels only what is presented to the senses or fixed in the memory, and makes no combinations of its own, is thought to 'account in part for the effect which exhibitions of fictitious distress produce on some persons, who do not discover much sensibility to the calamities of real life. In a

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novel or a tragedy the picture is completely finished in all its parts, and we are made acquainted, not only with every circumstance on which the distress turns, but with the sentiments and feelings of every character with respect to his situation. In real life we see, in general, only detached scenes of the tragedy; and the impression is slight, unless the imagination finishes the characters and supplies the incidents that are wanting.' There is a cold, unfeeling temperament, an icy hardness, whose pulse never throbs with tender sensations. Others are as much too easily moved. They have a morbid delicacy, which well make them wish to avoid the sights and sounds of mise A readiness to be affected by images of sorrow is a characteristick of the female heart. When was woman ever wanting in compassion? Connexion with ourselves, our private affections, our interests, and experience, has a necessary influence upon this class of feelings. He jests at scars, who never felt a wound.' He talks to me,' says the weeping mother, he talks to me, who never had a son.' In the near relations of life, our sympathy with others is often identified with personal suffering. What they feel we feel, perhaps without the miti gations and supports, which they experience, and in a greater degree than they. Selfishness, in its different forms, is an antagonist of compassion. Pride keeps us at a distance from vulgar and inelegant distress. Avarice hardens the mind against the compunctious visitings of nature,' though it will allow us to weep at artificial mis ery, which does not need a friend. The gaiety of disposition, or the gelfishness of temper, that often

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accompany prosperous fortunes, or a dissipated life, are at variance with a sentimental, participating heart. Accustomed to live for selfgratification, their affections begin and end at home. They have few of those feelings, which prompt us to claim kindred with the fallen and the unhappy. Shall the tear of pity dim that eye, which is kindled with joy? Shail the gloom of sympathetick sorrow be allowed to gather on minds, which good fortune enables to dwell in the day-light of perpetual cheerfulness? he, who is intent on pleasure, turn aside from his pursuit to behold a sight of distress? Shall the soft indolence of his mind be disturbed by images of misery; or the noise of his mirth be interrupted by the cries of affliction? If he must contract acquaintance with misfortune, let it be only the mimick sorrow and fictitious woe of tragedy and romance, which it will cost him no pain nor trouble to compassionate. There is a laughing tribe, who cannot be expected to be very pitiful. So long as they have no affliction of their own, they retain a constant disposition to wit, humour, and ridicule, to the comedy and farce of life. It has been said of this temper, that a certain degree of vanity, or light pride, is necessary to feed and support it; and though it is never, perhaps, allied to dark envy or atrocious malignity, it is never entirely free from a share of sordid selfishness; for as the perpetual smile of gaiety can only flow from the heart, which is perpetually at ease, it can only flow from that, which carries the ingredients of perpetual ease always within itself; and these are affections, which never diverge far from its own centre.',

Novelty, education, custom, fashion, habit exert their influence on

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this part of our constitution. When the revolutionary scaffold in Paris was daily smoking with the blood of its victims, the spectacle lost its interest with the people. The monster, Robespierre, who then governed, in the latter days of his power, is said to have procured the condemnation and execution of nine young and beautiful girls, who presented a chaplet to the Prussian commander at Verdun, merely to rouse the wearied attention of the populace by a more affecting exhibition.' The events The events of Europe, and especially in one country of it, for the last sixteen years, consisting of a succession of crimes and horrours, of civil massacres, and bloody wars, have operated by excess of stimulus to impair the sensibility of mankind. Age debilitates the feelings; and the professions, which occasion a familiarity with sufferings, tend to convert the humanity, which at first was instinct and emotion, into principle and habit. The rude

vulgar know nothing of refinements of feeling, which belong to the cultivated. Customs and manners increase or diminish the susceptibility. Roman gentlemen and ladies enjoyed the fights of gladiators in the bloody arena.

The opinion of merit and propriety always enters into our sympathies. Selfish, frivolous, and excessive sorrows, unbecoming the character of the subject, whether real or feigned, indicative of pusillanimity or atrocity, we refuse to partake. In real life we revere and love those persons, who appear to feel much for others, and little for themselves; who are at once affectionate and humane, patient and magnanimous. These are some of the properties and operations of our sympathetick feelings. Are these feelings ever productive of pleasure? What is the cause of this pleasure? What is their value and use in respect to character and enjoyment?

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ANOMALIES

will exist in language, as well as in nature. The rules of a language must be supplied by itself; and the si volet usus of Horace answers a thousand objections of half-learned criticks. Priestley says, The word means belongs to the class of words, which do not change their termination, on account of number; for it is used alike in both numbers.' Campbell, who, in grammar, is a yet better authority, is of the same opinion. No person of taste,' he remarks, will, I presume, venture so far to violate the present usage, and conquently to shock the ears of the generality of readers as to say, By this mean, by that mean. Even Webster is ashamed to contend for such phrases. Yet one half the lawyers and clergymen of this metropolis are continually labour ing to reduce this noun means to the obedience of common law. Let them turn to Lindley Murray, who adduces examples against them from fifteen authors of the first celebrity. In vain, therefore, am I told, that means and amends were once trained among regular troops, when I know that they now are enlisted in the corps of dragoons; and that in that service they have been honoured with the commands of Addison, Atterbury, Blackstone, Burke, Pope, Swift, and other literary heroes of the same rank.

BURKE AND LAHARPE.

IT is not a little curious, though not perhaps surprising, that Burke, the earliest of the anti-revolutionary enthusiasts in England, and Laharpe, the most eloquent of the anti-jacobins in France, should have seized upon precisely the same image, to depict the unnatural odiousness of the worst of those

factions, which successively exercised the democratick tyranny of the revolution. The celebrated letter to, the duke of Bedford was written in 1796. Who remembers not the following passage? The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotick anarchy, which generates equivocally" all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.'

Laharpe, at the re-opening of the Lyceum in the year 1794, after the fall of Robespierre, delivered a discourse, conceived in a style of splendid, indignant, exulting, and vehement eloquence, which is hardly inferiour to the philippicks of Demosthenes, and not unlike the declamations of Cicero against Antony. No man in France, and except Burke in Europe, had then dared to speak in such a tone of energetick indignation of what Laharpe then first called the reign of monsters. We have translated the following passage. He has been speaking of the intrusion of the ignorant and brutal creatures of Robespierre at the meetings of the Lyceum. In one word,' says Laharpe, this irruption of our tyrants, to overawe and pollute the peaceful festivals we here enjoy, can be represented only by one of those fabulous inventions, which enable the mind to conceive of those that are real, (by the creation

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