guard it! It is no equivocal indication of the slender power of a person's principles, when they do not restrain him any longer than his misdeeds will produce exposure. She who is immodest at a masquerade, is modest nowhere. She may affect the language of delicacy and maintain external decorum, but she has no purity of mind.

THE FIELD. If we proceed with the calculation of the benefits and mischiefs of field-sports, in the merchant-like manner of debtor and creditor, the balance is presently found to be greatly against them. The advantages to him who rides after hounds and shoots pheasants, are that he is amused, and possibly that his health is improved; some of the disadvantages are -that it is unpropitious to the influence of religion and the dispositions which religion induces; that it expends money and time which a man ought to be able to employ better; and that it inflicts gratuitous misery upon the inferior animals. The value of the pleasure cannot easily be computed, and as to health it may pass for nothing; for if a man is so little concerned for his health that he will not take exercise without dogs and guns, he has no reason to expect other men to concern themselves for it in remarking upon his actions. And then for the other side of the calculation. That field-sports have any tendency to make a man better, no one will pretend; and no one who looks around him will doubt that their tendency is in the opposite direction. It is not necessary to show that every one who rides after the dogs is a worse man in the evening than he was in the morning : the influence of such things is to be sought in those with whom they are habitual. Is the character of the sportsman, then, distinguished by religious sensibility? No. By activity of benevolence? No. By intellectual exertion? No. By purity of manners? No.

Sportsmen are not the persons who diffuse the light of Christianity, or endeavor to rectify the public morals, or to extend the empire of knowledge. Look again at the clerical sportsman. Is he usually as exemplary in the discharge of his functions as those who decline such diversions? His parishioners know that he is not. So, then, the religious and moral tendency of fieldsports is bad. It is not necessary to show how the ill effect is produced. It is sufficient that it actually is produced.

As to the expenditure of time and money, I dare say we shall be told that a man has a right to employ both as he chooses. We have heretofore seen that he has no such right. Obligations apply just as truly to the mode of employing leisure and property, as to the use which a man may make of a pound of arsenic. The obligations are not indeed alike enforced in a court of justice the misuser of arsenic is carried to prison, the misuser of time and money awaits as sure an enquiry at another tribunal. But no folly is more absurd than that of supposing we have a right to do whatever the law does not punish. Such is the state of mankind, so great is the amount of misery and degradation, and so great are the effects of money and active philanthropy in meliorating this condition of our species, that it is no light thing for a man to employ his time and property upon vain and needless gratifications. It is no light thing to keep a pack of hounds, and to spend days and weeks in riding after them. As to the torture which field-sports inflict upon animals, it is wonderful to observe our inconsistencies. He who has, in the day, inflicted upon half a dozen animals almost as much torture as they are capable of sustaining, and who has wounded perhaps half a dozen more, and left them to die of pain or starvation, gives in the evening a grave reproof to his child, whom he sees amusing

himself with picking off the wings of flies! The infliction of pain is not that which gives pleasure to the sportsman, (this were ferocious depravity,) but he voluntarily inflicts the pain in order to please himself. Yet this man sighs and moralizes over the cruelty of children! An appropriate device for a sportsman's dress would be a pair of balances, of which one scale was laden with "virtue and humanity," and the other with "sport; " the latter should be preponderating and lifting the other into the air.

THE TURF is still worse, partly because it is a stronghold of gambling, and therefore an efficient cause of misery and wickedness. It is an amusement of almost unmingled evil. But upon whom is the evil chargeable? Upon the fifty or one hundred persons only who bring horses and make bets? No; every man participates who attends the course. The great attraction of many public spectacles, and of this amongst others, consists more in the company than the ostensible object of amusement. Many go to a race-ground who cannot tell when they return what horse has been the victor. Every one therefore who is present must take his share of the mischief and the responsibility.

It is the same with respect to the gross and vulgar diversions of boxing, wrestling, and feats of running and riding. There is the same almost pure and unmingled evil the same popularity resulting from the concourses who attend, and, by consequence, the participation and responsibility in those who do attend. The drunkenness, and the profaneness, and the debauchery, lie in part at the doors of those who are merely lookers-on; and if these lookers-on make pretensions to purity of character, their example is so much the more influential and their responsibility tenfold increased.

The vicissitudes of folly are endless: the vulgar

games of the present day may soon be displaced by others, the same in genus, but differing in species. There is a grossness, a vulgarity, a want of mental elevation in these things, which might induce the man of intelligence to reprobate them even if the voice of morality were silent. They are remains of barbarismevidences that barbarism still maintains itself amongst us-proofs that the higher qualities of our nature are not sufficiently dominant over the lower.

These grossnesses will pass away, as the deadly conflicts of men with beasts are passed already. Our posterity will wonder at the barbarism of us, their fathers, as we wonder at the barbarism of Rome. Let him, then, who loves intellectual elevation advance beyond the present times, and anticipate, in the recreations which he encourages, that period when these diversions shall be regarded as indicating one of the intermediate stages between the ferociousness of mental darkness and the purity of mental light.

These criticisms might be extended to many other species of amusement; and it is humiliating to discover that the conclusion will very frequently be the samethat the evil outbalances the good, and that there are no grounds upon which a good man can justify a participation in them. In thus concluding, it is possible that the reader may imagine that we would exclude enjoyment from the world, and substitute a system of irreproachable austerity. He who thinks this is unacquainted with the nature and sources of our better enjoyments. It is an ordinary mistake to imagine that pleasure is great only when it is vivid or intemperate, as a child fancies it were more delightful to devour a pound of sugar at once, than to eat an ounce daily in his food. It is happily and kindly provided that the greatest sum of enjoyment is that which is quietly and

constantly induced. No men understand the nature of pleasure so well, or possess it so much, as those who find it within their own doors. If it were not that moral education is so bad, multitudes would seek enjoyment and find it here, who now fancy that they never partake of pleasure except in scenes of diversion. It is unquestionably true that no community enjoys life more than that which excludes all these amusements from its sources of enjoyment. We use therefore the language, not of speculation, but of experience, when we say, that none of them is, in any degree, necessary to the happiness of life.

CHAPTER XIII.

SUICIDE.

Unmanliness of Suicide-Forbidden in the New Testament-Its

folly.

THERE are few subjects upon which it is more difficult either to write or to legislate with effect, than that of suicide. It is difficult to a writer, because a man does not resolve upon the act until he has first become steeled to some of the most powerful motives that can be urged upon the human mind; and to the legislator, because he can inflict no penalty upon the offending party.

It is to be feared that there is little probability of diminishing the frequency of this miserable offence by urging the considerations which philosophy suggests. The voice of nature is louder and stronger than the voice of philosophy and as nature speaks to the suicide in vain, what is the hope that philosophy will be regarded?—There appears to be but one efficient means