your reverence, why, with such a taste for poverty, you do not relinquish a station which withholds you from indulging so simple and so cheap a relish?

Dean.Alas! good Mr. Curate, there is no persuading one's wife and children to follow rational pleasures. A refinement of thinking, which is beyond the reach of low uninformed minds, is necessary to qualify for these rich gratifications. For my own part, I never pass, in my chariot and pair, the humble cottage that stands in the dell at the end of my lawn, without sighing for the sober serenity which reigns in that peaceful mansion. The moon, which sends her broken light through the branches of the old elm that shelters this little dwelling, opens to my delighted vision such a picturesque display of crazy beams, fractured casements, broken doors, and ragged children, as never fails to throw my mind into one of those ecstasies of delicious melancholy, known only to such as are elevated above the spurious splendour of vulgar greatness.

Curate. To give yet higher touches to this pleasing melancholy, and to render it yet more picturesque, let us suppose a tremendous storm beating in through the battered roof; the cries of children, and squalls of famished cats, borne along in blended harmony by the ravished winds!-who would not give up a deanery, and club-tailed coach-horses, and pipes of Madeira, for such bewitching sorrows?

Dean.- Nay, sir, this is straining my meaning rather further than was intended. If you respect rank and dignity so little, as to throw ridicule upon my remarks, I have done with the conversation.

Curate. I beg, reverend sir, a thousand pardons, and frankly acknowledge the coarse make of my mind, that cannot enter into such sublime satisfac

tions. My life has been exposed to many heavy misfortunes, from which I have never known how to extract any pleasing reflections: nothing elegant has ever mixed itself with my sorrows; and I have sometimes wanted a dinner, without any satisfaction from those feasts of imagination which refinement affords. I am never so well disposed as after a comfortable meal, to relish that sublime passage of our immortal poet,

"And bring with thee calm peace and quiet;

Spare Fast, that oft with gods doth diet;

And hear the Muses, in a ring,

Aye round about Jove's altar sing."

I am tempted to believe, that, in general, those men think highest of these enjoyments, who are most at their ease; as those who possess a firm footing on the shore, contemplate with the most delight a storm

at sea.

Dean. Why, sir, I will confess that the grossness of bodily suffering is inconsistent with these subtile and refined sentiments; and even hunger, when carried beyond a certain pitch, ceases to be picturesque, and becomes too rude and querulous to harmonise with such gentle emotions: though I am convinced, that, to the functions of the brain, and the operation of the intellect, nothing is so physically and morally conducive, as an exclusion from the pleasures of the table. Corporeal temperance is mental luxury; and the Muse is sooner inebriated with the limpid beverage of the pure fountain, than with the richest draughts which the grape can afford; more pampered with a pottage of herbs, than with the choicest viands that were ever thought of by the sons of sensuality. But I give up the defence of fasting, since it is impossible for me to impart to you a conception of pleasures which nature has not

qualified you to feel. Let me only contend for those sober delights which result from a melancholy train of reflections, such as the pensive enthusiast experiences when reposing on the tomb of his friend, or when bathing the cold urn of his departed wife with tears of delicious sorrow. Alas! the worldling, taught, from his earliest youth, to misconstrue the design of his creation, and to place the happiness of life in the indulgence of appetite, exercised in vanities till the frame of his mind becomes too slight to endure reflection, and condemned in a manner, by the conditions of his estate, to let his finest attributes and faculties run to waste and corruption, has no idea of that indescribable mysterious pleasure which is born of our sorrows, and certain delicate capacities of delight to which the turbulence of his career keeps him ever a stranger.

Curate. Alas! sir, what you say may be very true, and is certainly very eloquent. But I cannot help thinking that we call the sentiment of which you speak by a wrong name; it is not melancholy, but so different a thing, as only to live in minds naturally cheerful and unacquainted with genuine grief. You talk of the pleasure of leaning on the tomb of one that was dear to your bosom. This sounds well in a monody; and, to write a monody on a departed friend, requires this kind of supposititious and prating sorrow. Permit me, without offence, to ask if you have any real friends, if you have wife or children in the church-yard? Perhaps you have never tried the effects of a visit to their tombs. Alas! sir, I have lost the dearest friend on earth; my Lucy, the partner for twenty years of all my joys and troubles, lies in a corner of our parish burying-ground. I buried her in a corner, because I desire to pass as seldom as possible a spot that is calculated to call up in

my mind pains, genuine, unmixed pains, that can never be alleviated. I love not to talk of her---I have never written a line about her; and as I sometimes am forced to pass over her grassy tomb, tears so little pleasant pour down my cheeks, that I would willingly exchange them for the smile that sits on the fat unthinking face of a smirking auctioneer.

N° 86. SATURDAY, JANUARY II.

Ως εν τινι φρερᾶ εσμεν οι Ανθρωποι και 8 δει δη ἑαυτον εκ ταύτης λύειν εδ' αποδιδράσκειν.

PLATO.

Every man has a certain post to guard and maintain here, and it does not become him to desert and abandon it.

My last paper took a view of melancholy under its milder shapes and appearances; it also considered the subject under certain aspects in which so much trifling and affectation are blended, as to raise in us rather the sentiment of ridicule than compassion. There are, however, certain heights of the disorder where its dreadful symptoms begin to appear, and where its physical and moral effects disclose themselves unequivocally in the mind and in the counte

nance.

It is not a pleasing consideration, but I am afraid the remark is true, that there is something of an elevation and dignity in real grief that seems to become the human species, and, amidst all its depredations on

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the person and the mind, substitutes an indescribable grace and comeliness of its own, that interests and engages our hearts. Perhaps it is, that in this world of tragedies there is a sort of stage decorum violated by those merry performers that interrupt the impression and outrage the moral of the scene. If this life be a vale of tears, there is doubtless, in the mirthful character, a want of consentaneity and accord, a want of harmony and keeping with the surrounding circumstances, that may in some sort account for the uninteresting effect of habitual merriment. There are perhaps, too, some moral reasons which may account for this truth; and part of the presumption against a laughing character may be grounded on the inference we involuntarily make to the disadvantage of that man's sensibility or penetration, who, “ in a . world bursting with sin and sorrow," can preserve an unpausing hilarity, and "sing the songs of Sion" in a land where calamity is our portion. Neither are the instances of folly, vanity, and absurdity, with which life abounds, the proper theme of merriment to man; and the presumption and self-exaltation which this mirth betrays, is of the same piece with that common imbecility by which this mirth is excited. Man moves in a circle of infirmity and corruption, where all are pressing and pressed forwards in the same limited compass, and returning again to the same point; perpetually moving and perpetually recurring; where there is no first nor last, but each is in the middle of the rest; and where, though each to himself seems to be flying off in a tangent, a strong and paramount gravitation pulls him back to the common centre, and imprisons him fast in the same round of mortifying repetition. No man, that employs time enough in the examination of himself, has leisure to laugh at his fellow-creatures; and while