enmities to have both strong, but both selected in the one, to be placable; in the other, immoveable. To model our principles to our duties and our situation. To be fully persuaded that all virtue which is impracticable is spurious; and rather to run the risk of falling into faults in a course which leads us to act with effect and energy, than to loiter out our days without blame and without use. Public life is a situation of power and energy: he trespasses against his duty who sleeps upon his watch, as well as he that goes over to the enemy.

CICERO, de Fin. lib. v. § 65, 66, 67.

SENECA, Epist. viii.

De Tranquill. c. 3.

THE USEFUL ARTS ONCE INVENTED ARE NEVER LOST.

ORTUNATELY for mankind the more useful, or at least,

FORT

more necessary arts can be performed without superior talents or national subordination: without the powers of one or the union of many. Each village, each family, each individual must always possess both ability and inclination to perpetuate the use of fire and of metals; the propagation and service of domestic animals; the methods of hunting and fishing; the rudiments of navigation; the imperfect cultivation of corn, or other nutritive grains; and the simple practise of the mechanic trades. Private genius and public industry may be extirpated, but these hardy plants survive the tempest, and strike an everlasting root into the most unfavourable soil. The splendid days of Augustus and Trajan were eclipsed by a cloud of ignorance; and the barbarians subverted the laws and palaces of Rome. But the scythe, the invention or emblem of Saturn, still continued annually to mow the harvests of Italy, and the human feasts of the Læstrygons have never been renewed on the coasts of Campania. Since the first

discovery of the arts, war, commerce, and religious zeal have diffused among the savages of the Old and New World these inestimable gifts; they have been successively propagated, they can never be lost. We may therefore acquiesce in the pleasing conclusion, that every age of the world has increased and still increases, the real wealth, the happiness, the knowledge, and perhaps the virtue of the human race.-Gibbon.

CICERO, de Offic. lib. ii. § 12, 13, 14, 15.

SENECA, Epist. xc.

MEN CLING TO LIFE EVEN UNDER THE MOST
MISERABLE CONDITIONS.

I

HAVE often thought with myself, that I went on too far, and

that in so long a voyage I should infallibly at last meet with some severe shock. I perceived and oft enough declared that it was time to be off, and that life was to be cut to the quick, according to the surgeon's rule in the amputation of a limb; and that nature usually made him pay very dear interest who did not in due time restore the principal. And yet I was so far from being then ready, that in the eighteen months' time or thereabouts that I have been in this uneasy condition, I have inured myself to it, I have compounded with this colic, and have found therein to comfort myself and to hope. So much are men enslaved to their miserable being that there is no condition so wretched that they will not accept for preserving it. Maecenas said, "Let me be weak in hand, back, loin, and teeth: what does it matter so that life remains?" And Tamerlane with a foolish humanity palliated the fantastic cruelty he exercised upon lepers when he put all he could hear of to death, by pretending to deliver them from a painful life; for there was not one of them who would not rather have undergone a triple leprosy than to be deprived of their being. Antisthenes the

Stoic being very sick and crying out, "Who will deliver me from these evils?" Diogenes, who was come to visit him, “This,” said he, presenting him with a knife," presently, if thou wilt." "I do not say from my life," he replied, "but from my disease."

SENECA, Epist. ci. lviii. ad finem.

PLINY, Epist. vi. 26.

THAT HAPPINESS CONSISTS IN LIVING ACCORDING TO

"THIS

NATURE.

HIS," said a philosopher who had heard him with tokens of great impatience, "is the present condition of a wise man. The time is already come, when none are wretched but by their own fault. Nothing is more idle than to inquire after happiness, which nature has kindly placed within our reach. The way to be happy is to live according to nature, in obedience to that universal and unalterable law, with which every heart is originally impressed, which is not written on it by precept, but engraven by destiny; not instilled by education, but infused at our nativity. He that lives according to nature will suffer nothing from the delusions of hope, or the importunities of desire: he will receive and reject with equability of temper; and act or suffer as the reason of things shall alternately prescribe. Other men may amuse themselves with subtle definitions, or intricate ratiocinations. Let them learn to be wise by easier means; let them observe the hind of the forest, and the linnet of the grove: let them consider the life of animals whose motions are regulated by instinct; they obey their guide, and are happy. Let us therefore at length cease to dispute, and learn to live; throw away the incumbrance of precepts, which they who utter them with so much pride and pomp do not understand, and carry with us this simple and intelligible maxim, that deviation from nature is deviation from happiness."

CICERO, de Fin. lib. v. § 26. SENECA, de Vita Beata, c. 8.

A MORALISt of brobDINGNAG ON THE DEGENERACY OF THE HUMAN RACE.

I

HAVE perused many of their books, especially those on history and morality. Among the rest I was much diverted with a little old treatise which treats of the weakness of human kind, and is in little esteem, except among the women and the vulgar. However, I was curious to see what an author of that country could say upon such a subject. This writer went through all the usual topics of European moralists, showing how diminutive, contemptible, and helpless an animal was man in his own nature; how unable to defend himself from inclemencies of the air, or the fury of wild beasts; how much he was excelled by one creature in strength, by another in speed, by a third in foresight, by a fourth in industry. He added that nature was degenerated in these latter declining ages of the world, and could now produce only small abortive births in comparison of those in ancient times. He said it was very reasonable to think not only that the species of men were originally much larger, but also that there must have been giants in former ages; which, as it is asserted by history and tradition, so it hath been confirmed by huge bones and skulls casually dug up in several parts of the kingdom, far exceeding the common dwindled race of man in our days. He argued that the very laws of nature absolutely required we should have been made in the beginning of a size more large and robust, not so liable to destruction from every little accident of a tile falling from a house, or a stone cast from the hand of a boy, or being drowned in a little brook. From this way of reasoning the author drew several moral applications, useful in the conduct of life, but needless here to repeat. For my own part, I could not avoid reflecting how universally this talent was spread, of drawing lectures in morality, or, indeed, rather matter of dis

content and repining, from the quarrels we raise with nature. And, I believe, upon a strict inquiry, these quarrels might be shown as ill-grounded among us as they are among that people.— Swift.

SENECA, Dialog. x. c. 1, 2. De Beneficiis, iv. c. 18.
VIRGIL, Geo. i. 493-497.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT-HOW FAR IS IT A SPECIFIC AGAINST CRIME?

WE

E are all of us condemned to die, and that, as we well know by an irrevocable sentence, of which the execution cannot be many years deferred, and may be to-morrow-and yet how little do we think of this, not only when youth and health seem to place between us and the dark valley beyond a hill which we have yet to ascend, but when declining age and failing health have brought us to the strait and sloping road, out of which there is no turning, and of which, though we cannot see the exact end, we know very well where to look for it. We are even willing for the most futile causes to multiply the chances of death which each day brings with it; we do it for the sake of gain, we do it for the sake of pleasure, we do it even sometimes for the want of something else to do.

Remembering this, and considering it as we should do, we may well wonder that lawgivers should have trusted so much to the threat of death, that is, to an increased probability of dying in a particular way, as a sort of specific against crime. But, in truth, this was not, I think, the original reason of capital punishment. The slaying of the homicide was at first meant as an act of vengeance against him, rather than as a warning to others; it was rather given to the family of the sufferer as a consolation, than exacted by society for its protection; and this primitive