this kind, which I am acquainted with, is that on a French General:

'Siste, Viator; Heroem calcas!'

Stop, traveller; thou treadest on a hero!

(No. IX.)

Scires è sanguine natos.—Ovid.

W.

Ir is common for busy and active men to behold the occupations of the retired and contemplative person with contempt. They consider his speculations as idle and unproductive; as they participate in none of his feelings, they are strangers to his motives, his views, and his delights: they behold him elaborately employed on what they conceive forwards none of the interests of life, contributes to none of its gratifications, removes none of its inconveniences: they conclude, therefore, that he is led away by the delusions of futile philosophy, that he labours for no good, and lives to no end. Of the various frames of mind which they observe in him, no one seems to predominate more, and none appears to them more absurd, than sadness, which seems, in some degree, to pervade all his views, and shed a solemn tinge over all his thoughts. Sadness, arising from no personal grief, and connected with no individual concern, they regard as moon-struck melancholy, the effect of a mind overcast with constitutional gloom, and diseased with habits of vain and fanciful speculation. We can share with the sorrows of the unfortunate,' say they, 'but this monastic spleen merits only our derision: it tends to no beneficial purpose; it benefits neither its possessor nor society.' Those who have thought a little more on this subject than the gay and busy crowd, will draw conclusions

of a different nature. That there is a sadness, springing from the noblest and purest sources, a sadness friendly to the human heart, and, by direct consequence, to human nature in general, is a truth which a little illustration will render tolerably clear, and which, when understood in its full force, may probably convert contempt and ridicule into respect,

I set out, then, with the proposition, that the man who thinks deeply, especially if his reading be extensive, will unless his heart be very cold and very light, become habituated to a pensive, or, with more propriety, a mournful cast of thought. This will arise from two more particular sources-from the view of human nature in general, as demonstrated by the experience both of past and present times, and from the contemplation of individual instances of human depravity and of human suffering. The first of these is, indeed, the last in the order of time, for his general views of humanity are in a manner consequential, or resulting from the special; but I have inverted that order for the sake of perspicuity.

Of those who have occasionally thought on these subjects, I may, with perfect assurance of their reply, inquire what have been their sensations when they have, for a moment, attained a more enlarged and capacious notion of the state of man in all its bearings and dependencies? They have found, and the profoundest philosophers have done no more, that they are enveloped in mystery, and that the mystery of man's situation is not without alarming and fearful circumstances. They have discovered that all they know of themselves is that they live, but that from whence they came, or whither they are going, is by Nature altogether hidden; that impenetrable gloom surrounds

them on every side, and that they even hold their morrow on the credit of to-day, when it is, in fact, buried in the vague and indistinct gulf of the ages to come! These are reflections deeply interesting, and lead to others so awful, that many gladly shut their eyes on the giddy and unfathomable depths which seem to stretch before them. The meditative man, however, endeavours to pursue them to the farthest stretch of the reasoning powers, and to enlarge his conceptions of the mysteries of his own existence; and the more he learns, and the deeper he penetrates, the more cause does he find for being serious, and the more inducements to be continually thoughtful.

If, again, we turn from the condition of mortal existence, considered in the abstract, to the qualities and characters of man, and his condition in a state of society, we see things perhaps equally strange and infinitely more affecting.-In the economy of creation, we perceive nothing inconsistent with the power of an allwise and all-merciful God. A perfect harmony runs through all the parts of the universe. Plato's syrens sing not only from the planetary octave, but through all the minutest divisions of the stupendous whole; order, beauty, and perfection, the traces of the great Architect, glow through every particle of his work. At man, however, we stop there is one exception. The harmony of order ceases, and vice and misery disturb the beautiful consistency of creation, and bring us first acquainted with positive evil. We behold men carried irresistibly away by corrupt principles and vicious inclinations, indulging in propensities, destructive as well to themselves as to those around them; the stronger oppressing the weaker, and the bad persecuting the good! We see the depraved in prosperity, the virtuous in adversity,

the guilty unpunished, the deserving overwhelmed with unprovoked misfortunes. From hence we are tempted to think, that He, whose arm holds the planets in their course, and directs the comets along their eccentric orbits, ceases to exercise his providence over the affairs of mankind, and leaves them to be governed and directed by the impulses of a corrupt heart, or the blind workings of chance alone. Yet this is inconsistent both with the wisdom and the goodness of the Deity. If God permit evil, he causes it: the difference is casuistical. We are led, therefore, to conclude, that it was not always thus; that man was created in a far differ-> ent and far happier condition; but that, by some means or other, he has forfeited the protection of his Maker. Here then is a mystery. The ancients, led by reasonings alone, perceived it with amazement, but did not solve the problem. They attempted some explanation of it by the lame fiction of a golden age and its cession, where, by a circular mode of reasoning, they attribute the introduction of vice to their gods having deserted the earth, and the desertion of the gods to the introduction of vice.* This, however, was the logic of the poets; the philosophers disregarded the fable, but did

* Και τοτε δη προς όλυμπον απο χθονος ευρυοδείης,
Λευκοίσιν φαρέεσσι καλυψαμένω χροα καλον,
Αθανατων μετα φυλον ιτον, προλιποντ' ανθρώπους
Αιδώς και Νεμεσις· τα δε λείψεται άλγεα λυγρα
Θνετοις ανθροποισι, κακου δ' ουκ εσσεται αλκη.

Hesiod. Opera et Dies. Lib. i. 195.
Victa jacet Pietas: et Virgo cæde madentes,
Ultima cœlestum terras Astræa reliquit.

Ovid. Metamor. L. i. Fab. 4.

Paulatim deinde ad Superos Astræà recessit,
Hac comite atque duæ pariter fugere sorores.

Juvenal. Sat. vi. 1. 10.

not dispute the fact it was intended to account for. They often hint at human degeneracy, and some unknown curse hanging over our being, and even coming into the world along with us. Pliny, in the preface to his seventh book, has this remarkable passage: 'The animal about to rule over the rest of created animals lies weeping, bound hand and foot, making his first entrance upon life with sharp pangs, and this, for no other crime than that he is born man.'-Cicero, in a passage, for the preservation of which we are indebted to St. Augustine, gives a yet stronger idea of an existing degeneracy in human nature:-'Man,' says he, comes into existence, not as from the hands of a mother, but of a step-dame nature, with a body feeble, naked, and fragile, and a mind exposed to anxiety and care, abject in fear, unmeet for labour, prone to licentiousness, in which, however, there still dwell some sparks of the divine mind, though obscured, and, as it were, in ruins.'

And, in another place, he intimates it as a current opinion, that man comes into the world as into a state of punishment expiatory of crimes committed in some previous stage of existence, of which we now retain no recollection.

From these proofs, and from daily observation and experience, there is every ground for concluding that man is in a state of misery and depravity quite inconsistent with the happiness for which, by a benevolent God, he must have been created. We see glaring marks of this in our own times. Prejudice alone blinds us to the absurdity and the horror of those systematic murders which go by the name of wars, where man falls on man, brother slaughters brother; where death, in every variety of horror, preys on the finely-fibred human frame;' and where the cry of the widow and the

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