Self-denial, abasement! answered the facquier; I would have you to know, that I consent to be flogged in this world, only to give it you home in the other, when you shall be horses and I the rider.

Thus they who have affirmed self-love to be the basis of all our sentiments and all our actions, are much in the right, in India, Spain, and all the habitable parts of the earth; and as there is no occasion to demonstrate that men have a face, as little need there is of proving to them that they are actuated by self-love. This self-love is the means of our preservation; and like the instrument of the perpetuation of the species, it is necessary, it is clear to us, it gives us pleasure, but still is to be concealed.

LUXURY.

FOR these two thousand years past luxury has been declaimed against, both in verse and prose; and still mankind has always delighted in it.

What encomiums have been bestowed on the primitive Romans, when those banditti ravaged their neighbours fields! when, to increase their poor village, they destroyed the poor villages of the Volsci and Samnites. They were, to be sure, men of a glorious disinterestedness, and elevated virtue! gold, silver, and jewels they never had stolen, because there were no such things in the towns which they pillaged; their woods and fens afforded no partridges nor pheasants; and their temperance is cried up.

When having gradually plundered people after people, from the Adriatic to the Euphrates,

they

they had sense enough to sit down in the quiet enjoyment of their rapine for seven or eight hundred years; when they cultivated every art and lived in every pleasure, and even introduced them among those whom they had conquered; then they are said to have lost both their prudence and virtue.

The substance of all these declamations is to prove, that a robber ought never to eat the dinner he has taken away, nor wear the cloaths or ring which he has stolen. Those things, say the declaimers, to keep themselves honest, they should have thrown into the river. Rather say, gentlemen that they ought not to have robbed; execrate rebbers as much as you please, but do not call them madmen, for quietly enjoying what they have got. Are those English to be blamed, who, after filling their purses at the taking of Pondicherry and the Havanna, made them something lighter amidst the diversions of London, in amends for the hardships they had undergone in Asia and America?

Would those declaimers have a man bury the riches which he may have acquired by war or agriculture, by trade and ingenuity? They quote Lacedemon, and why do they not also quote the republic of St. Marino? What good did Sparta ever do to Greece? Did it ever produce a Demosthenes; a Sophocles, an Apelles, or a Phidias ? whereas the luxury of Athens gave rise to great men of every kind. Sparta had some good commanders, and yet not so many as the other cities. But we will allow so petty a republic as Lacedemon to retain its poverty. Whether we live in scarcity, or in the affluent fruition of whatever makes life pleasant, we shall one day

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come

come to our journey's end. The Canadian lives, and lives to old age, as well as the Englishman who has fifty thousand pounds a year; but who will compare the country of the Iroquois to England?

That the republic of Ragusa and the Canton of Zug, make sumptuary laws, is right; the poor man is not to spend beyond his ability; and I have read somewhere,

"Luxury enriches the ample state,

Whilst the less prosp'rous sinks beneath its weight."

If by luxury you mean excess, excess in every thing is certainly pernicious: in abstinence as in gluttony, in parsimony as in liberality. I do not know how it comes to pass that, in my villages, where the soil is very indifferent, the taxes heavy, the prohibition against the exportation of grain intolerably rigid; yet is there scarce a farmer, who is not well cloathed and fed. But should this farmer follow his rural occupations in his best cloaths, clean linen, and his hair curled and powdered; a greater piece of luxury there could not be, besides the ridiculousness of it but for a citizen of Paris or London, to go to the play apparelled like this farmer, is a most clownish and indecent piece of stinginess.

"Est modus in rebus, sunt certi denique fines, Quos ultra citraque nequit consistere rectum.'

On the invention of Scissors, which certainly does not belong to the most remote antiquity, doubtless severe were the declamations against the first who pared their nails, and cropped off part of their hair, which hung down to their

nose.

hose. To be sure they were called fops and spendthrifts, laying out their money for an instrument of vanity, to mar the creator's work. What an enormity, to cut off the horn which God has caused to grow at our fingers ends! it is an insult to the Deity. But much worse was it on the first appearance of shirts and socks: it is still well known, with what heat the old counsellors, who had never worn any, exclaimed against the younger, who came into this destructive piece of luxury.

MADNESS.

I AM not going about to revive Erasmus's

treatise, which in our times would be but a common place-book, and that none of the most entertaining.

By madness is meant that distemper of the organs of the brain, which necessarily hinders a man from thinking and acting like others; if unable to manage his substance, a commission is issued out against him; if incapable of ideas suitable to society, he is excluded; if he be dangerous, he is shut up; and, if frantic, he is bound.

An important observation here is, that this man is not without ideas; he has them, whilst waking, like all other men, and often in his sleep. It may be asked how his soul, being spiritual and immortal, and residing in his brain, to which all the ideas are conveyed by the senses very plain and distinct, yet never forms a right

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a right judgment of them. It sees objects equally as the souls of Aristotle, Plato, Locke, and Newton; it hears the same sounds, it has the same sense of the touch; how happens it then, that with the same perceptions as the wisest men, it makes a wild incoherent jumble, without being able to help itself? If this simple and eternal substance has the same instruments, for acting as the souls of the wisest brains, it should reason like them; what can hinder it? If this madman sees red and the sensible man blue; if when this hears music, the madman hears the braying of an ass; if when they are at church, the madman thinks himself at the play; if when they hear yes, he hears no, I must of necessity conclude that his soul must think differently from the others. But this madman has the like perceptions as they; and there is no apparent reason why his soul, having through the senses received all its tools, cannot make use of them. It is said to be pure, to be, of itself, subject to no infirmity, to be provided with all necessary helps; and whatever happens in the body, its essence remains unalterable; yet it is carried in its case to Bedlam.

This reflection may give rise to an apprehension, that the faculty of thinking, with which man is endued, is liable to be disordered like the other senses. A madman is a patient, whose brain suffers; as a gouty man is a patient whose feet and hands suffer; he thought by means of the brain, as he walked with his feet, without knowing any thing of his incomprehensible power to walk, nor of his no less incomprehensible power to think. The brain may have the gout

as