tion and to aim at obtaining their applause, would only make your character inconsistent.

THERE are some people who find a gloomy kind of pleasure in glouting, which could hardly be increased by the satisfaction of having their wishes granted. This is, seemingly, a bad character and yet often connected with a sense of honour, of conscious merit, with warm gratitude, great sincerity, and many other valuable qualities.

with

THERE is a degree of understanding in women, which one not only ought to be contented, but absolutely pleased. -One would not, in them, require the unfathomable abyss.

THE worst consequence of gratifying our passions, in regard to objects of an indifferent nature, is, that it causes them to proceed with greater violence towards other and other objects; and so ad infinitum. I wish, for my pocket, an elegant etui; and gold to remove the pain of wishing, and partake the pleasure of enjoyment. I would part with the purchase-money, for which I have less regard; but the gratification of this

wish would generate fifty others, that would be ruinous. See Epictetus; who, therefore, advises to resist the first.

VIRTUE and agreeableness are, I fear, too often separated; that is, externals affect and captivate the fancy, where internal worth is wanting, to engage and attach one's reason-A most perplexing circumstance; and no where more remarkable, than when we see a wise man totally enslaved by the beauty of a person he despises.

I KNOW not whether increasing years do not cause one to esteem fewer people, and to bear with more.

QUERE, whether friendship for the sex do not tend to lessen the sensual appetite; and vice versâ.

I THINK, I never knew an instance of great quickness of parts being joined with great solidity. The most rapid rivers are seldom or never deep.

To be at once a rake, and to glory in the character, discovers at the same time a bad disposition and a bad taste.

THERE

THERE are persons who slide insensibly into a habit of contradiction. Their first endeavour, upon hearing aught asserted, is to discover wherein it may be plausibly disputed. This, they imagine, gives an air of great sagacity; and if they can mingle a jest with contradiction, think they display great superiority. One should be cautious against the advances of this kind of propensity, which loses us friends, in a matter generally of no consequence.

THE solicitude of peers to preserve, or to exalt, their rank, is esteemed no other than a manly and becoming ambition. The care of commoners, on the same subject, is deemed either vanity, formality, or pride.

AN income for life only seems the best calculated for the circumstances and situation of mortal man; the farther property in an estate increases the difficulty of disengaging our affections from this world, and of thinking in the manner we ought to think of a system from which we must be entirely separated :

I trust that sinking fund, my life.—Pope.

SURPRISE quickens enjoyment, and expectation

banishes

U

banishes surprise; this is the simple reason, why few pleasures, that have engrossed our attention previously, ever answer our ideas of them. Add to this, that imagination is a great magnifier, and causes the hopes we conceive to grow too large for their object-Thus expectation does not only destroy the advantage of surprise, and so flattens pleasure; but makes us hope for an imaginary addition, which gives the pain of disappointment.

ON

ON RELIGION.

ERHAPS, we should not pray to God to keep us stedfast in any faith; but conditionally, that it be a right one.

WHEN a tree is falling, I have seen the labourers, by a trivial jerk with a rope, throw it upon the spot where they would wish it should lie. Divines, understanding this text too literally, pretend, by a little interposition in the article of death, to regulate a person's everlasting happiness. I fancy, the allusion will hardly countenance their presumption.

WHEN misfortunes happen to such as dissent from us in matters of religion, we call them judgments : when to those of our own sect, we call them trials: when to persons neither way distinguished, we are content to impute them to the settled course of things.

IN regard to church-music, if a man cannot be

said