cause Will values and esteems him. We naturally love honour and distinction; and he who flatters us by homage, who makes our reputation and interest his own, will be sure to obtain our friendship. When that homage is withdrawn....when that sympathy has ceased, we sink not merely into indifference; but pass into the adverse element of anger and revenge. One instance of neutrality cancels all former good offices ....our pride would never have been mortified if it had never been flattered.

To this remark, I had only to repeat Jack's own words and admit the truth of them....that we love others because they love us: for if this be true, there is genuine benevolence in him who begins to love; and though we may have no claim to disinterestedness, those who provoke our affection by giving us their's gratuitously, have surely a title to that praise.

From this conclusion, Jack could easily escape, by averring that all gratuitous friendship, was self-interest and hypocrisy, and assumed for the sake of some advantage to be gained by it: I took some pains to remove this opinion, merely for Jack's sake; for surely a man, who harbours such opinions, must want one of the chief sources of human consolation and felicity.

The truth is, that the question about the disinterestedness of our passions, properly relates merely to their origin. The means by which the seeming opposition between theorists have been reconciled, have been the notion of a progress in our feelings; in consequence of which, that which begins in selfishness, terminates in generosity.

There is surely a capacity in human nature for loving and admiring intellectual and moral excellence. No excellence is more bewitching than that constitution of mind which impels men to love excellence for its own sake, and with out regard to their own interest. When this disposition is manifested by a man, it can hardly fail of excit

VOL. I....NO. V.

ing the attachment of a generous heart; and if this disposition selects ourselves as the objects of its ardour, what wonder that we love it the more on that account?

In their sensibility to excellence, and capacity for loving it, men differ from each other by numberless gradations. There is a scale, whose divisions would puzzle a Newton's arithmetic, to count from him who values others merely as they are instrumental to his own wealth, fame, or power, up to him who proportions his regard exactly to intrinsic merit. That the world at large furnishes numerous examples of the lowest, the highest, and of every intermediate degree in this scale, cannot be reasonably doubted. The numbers we assign to each division, affords, in some degree, a criterion of our own character, since we are extremely apt to make what we feel, and what we can do, the measure of other men's feelings and capacity.

To some men, the language of a kind and generous emotion is just as unintelligible as the terms of an Algebraic solution are to an uncultivated boor; or a discant on the purturbation of the planets to a girl of thirteen; or the dessection of a sunbeam into colorific and calorific rays to one born blind: in like manner there are, perhaps, a few, an happy few, who can as little comprehend those who love themselves only, and whose complacency for others is excited by nothing but incense offered to their pride, or gratifications administered to their sensuality.

There are many petty questions, in relation to this subject, that are always in discussion. Thus, how often is it asked, whether friendship can subsist between more than two persons: whether it can possibly subsist between man and woman: whether marriage does not dissolve all the ties of friendship: whether love for a woman add wings to our philanthropy, or take them away: whether the ties of kindred be, in their own nature, distinct from the friendly sentiment. On all these

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carfully investigated; his lodgingroom, and every dark corner of the house he occupied, were ransacked; his dress, voice, stature, and general manners, were accurately examined. The most transient and frivolous dialogues with those around him, were laboriously recalled to remembrance and compared with each other. All this curiosity arose from the simple circumstance of M'Coy's putting into his pocket, before his departure, a a few more hundreds than were strictly his due; and he thus become a personage of far more importance than his mother ever dreamed of. Great misfortunes,or great crimes are inevitable roads to notoriety. In England and America, where newspapers and other periodical works, fly about in such numbers, and penetrate into every the remotest and obscurest corner, the history of a worthless individual, whom nobody knew in his life time, shall, after his death, be an object of curiosity to millions. One, who died of famine and neglect, in the darkest garret of the obscurest alley in London, shall, twelve months afterwards, be, in all his habits and concerns, intimately known to the inhabitants of Jamaica, Canada, Bengal, and Kentucky.

Who, that has read or conversed within the last twenty years, is not familiar with the name of Dr. Dodd? Elwes is quite a proverb, wherever the English language is read. And no living poet, or statesman, has half as many to inquire after and talk about, as George Barrington. Nothing, indeed, is easier than to acquire fame; that is, to obtain the privilege of being talked about very much, and by a great many. Dodd, Elwes, and Barrington's ability may, perhaps, be termed infamy; but the truth is, that the memory of Elwes, is not generally pursued with either abhorrence or contempt. He is surveyed chiefly as a singularity or prodigy; and there are lines of magnanimity and genius in Barrington, which make him, on the whole, regarded with admiration and good will.

The celebrity of such men is, or ought to be, as much allied to praise as that of many authors and heroes, whose names enjoy the veneration of the multitude. In bestowing fame, the tendency of mens actions to good, are little considered, and those who merely go about doing good all the days of their life, are fated to obscurity; or at least, come in for the smallest share, in the distribution of renown. Great powers of invention, great knowledge, or a great command of the powers of others, are the recommendations to glory; and these, exerted with no moral or beneficient purpose whatever, but merely to gratify our own caprice, to elude poverty, amass wealth, or beguile the tediousness of leisure, have given to the temple of fame almost all its inhabitants.

CUI BONO?

My new astronomical acquaintance was haranging my visitants (there were three besides himself) this evening on the history of those stones which are supposed to have fallen from the upper regions of the atmosphere. He stated, with great precision,the various modes adopted by ingenious men, of accounting for this wonderful shower, and took the trouble to detail a mathematical confutation of those who maintain that these masses, are thrown by volcanic explosion from the moon.

These details excite the liveliest interest in all present, except H...... who wound up the conversation with the ingenious exclamation of Cui Bono? What matters it whence they fall, or whether they fall at all? What is the use of such inquiries?

There can hardly be a more absurd or unseasonable question introduced than this, Cui bono? There is hardly a surer indication of a narrow and short-sighted mind. Almost every man has his favourite pursuit, and while enthusiastically attached to that, holds in soverign contempt every other topic of inquiry. When he observes others busy in a path

different from his own, he is irresistibly tempted to exclaim.... What is the use of it? Not reflecting that others have just as good a right to arraign the usefulness and dignity of his pursuit, and that every one, who has a speculative path in which he delights to tread, has the same answer to make....It pleases me.

The mere Chymist, when he listens to the political theorist, is astonished any reasonable being should entertain a momentary regard for such contemptible objects. The dabbler in newspaper and party politics turns from the lucubrations of Lavoisier with disgust, and takes up the Gazette in search of some thing useful. He who spends his life in settling the true reading, and elucidating the true meaning of Theocritus or Chaucer, or in translating Milton or Grey into greek, makes scornful faces at him who is busy in examining the great points of morbed anatomy, or the form and texture of the body when affected with disease. The poet who muses all night long over elegy and sonnet, despises him who fatigues his brain with determining the directions and degrees of velocity with which water flows from a round hole, at the bottom of a cask. A collector of prints and paintings wonders that shame does not prevent his neighbour from roaming about the fields to pluck weeds, catch beetles, or pick up stones. Thus each enthusiast is absorbed in wonder that all mankind are not penetrated with the charms of his own idol, and that any reasonable being should value what he despises.

There is doubtles something that serves as a criterion of utility, by which the comparative value of all speculative studies, (for to them my present observations are confined) may be measured. Among different pursuits, some produce a pleasure more intense, more lasting, and effecting greater numbers than others; but this truth will scarcely justify any one in ridiculing or condemning his neighbour,

for in the first place, there is but one out of many thousands, which is best, and consequently all but one is liable to some objection. In the next place, there is none among all the thousand, wholly destitute of use and benefit, for whatever agreeably employs the human faculties is so far good: so far beneficial.

True wisdom requires us to rejoice that our neighbour is not worse employed than he is, since a pursuit which we may deem frivolous, is still better than the objects which engross the zeal of the majority of mankind, and candour will restrain our censure when we reflect that very probably, our own pursuits cannot be more easily defended from the charge of frivolous or hurtful than our neighbours, and that, if they really possess advantages which others want, our attachment was not excited by the perception of their superior dignity or usefulness but sprung up by accident. That we embraced it for exactly the same selfiish reason that influenced our neighbour, because some fatuitous association disposed us to find pleasure in it.

These are sufficient reasons why the votaries of different sciencesshould not dispise each other. It well becomes an enlightened mind, however, to entertain curiosity for every kind of truth, and to convert by the alchemy of a strong understanding, the basest matter into gold. Such a one will perceive the kindred ties which connect all the objects of human knowledge. He will be everywhere at home. He will extract useful and delightful information from a treatise upon heraldry: or a catalogue of Scottish kings, who reigned before the flood: or a volume of year-books: or one of Wordsworth's pastorals or Maria Regina Roche's novels. Such a one can listen with equal interest to Rumford while he expatiates on the proper form of a tea-kettle, and to Herschel while he decyphers the Galaxy, and finds valuable knowledge in each of them.