tomed rider ;—the vizier hung by a part of his robe, and was killed by a stroke of the creatures heel.

The account was brought to the palace; and even those who had murmured at the sudden exaltation of the man, pitied that. death he owed to his virtue: even provi dence was censured; so daring and so ignorant is man. But the caliph, superior to the rest in virtue, as in office, lifting up his hands to heaven, cried, "Blessed be thy sacrad name, O prophet!-I decreed. transitory honours to Atelmoule, but thou hast snatched him to those that never fade -to Paradise."

"It was a naughty fly, however, madam," said Miss Wentworth, "that stung the beast, and made him kill so good a man." "The poor fly," replied Mrs. Corbett, " was, my love, but a weak instrument in the hands of our great Creator, perhaps to snatch the virtuous Atelmoule

from

from impending danger; for who can answer, whether his morals would have remained untainted amidst the splendour and vice of courts; or might not envy at this unexpected preferment, have raised him enemies that would never have ceased pursuing him until covered with disgrace they had brought him to shame and death. I shall now relate to you Spleen," a moral tale.”

"The Man of

THE

MAN OF SPLEEN;

OR, THE

UNEXPECTED TRANSISION.

A MORAL TALE.

HAPPINESS is what all men wish for,

what all men may, in one respect or other, attain, but what few-alas! a very few indeed-are found in reality to possess.With every means to be happy within their grasp, we often find misery peculiarly triumphant in the bosoms of the rich and great; and though blessed beyond the multitude of their fellow creatures with what are generally termed blessings-health, wealth,

wealth, and an honourable name-they still seem to labour, as it were, to be wretched.

To this class of deplorable infatuation belonged the Hon. Sir Frederic Rutledge; the only surviving branch of an opulent and once numerous family in the county of Westmoreland; though from the rank he held in life the most respectable characters in the neighbourhood would have thought themselves honoured by his company, and his friendship; yet so little was the splenetic baronet inclined to cultivate a connexion with mankind in general, that he neither enjoyed, nor indeed seemed desirous to enjoy, any of the sweets that flow from the usual commerce of society.

If his fortune was great, his wants, however, were few. These, by leading a uniform life of rigid frugality and temperance, he had contracted within a narrow compass. He had no idea that his riches might be rendered subservient to his happiness;

.he

he was a stranger to every passion which might determine him by motives of pleasure; and he esteemed no engagement sufficiently binding to influence him by the calls of duty.

His condition became at length so irksome to him, that after. a number of gloomy reflections, he began to entertain an impious doubt whether it might not be justifiable to relinquish a life from which, to all appearance, he could never reap any satisfaction; and he argued with himself on this principle merely, that an uncertain existence, like that which succeeds to death, is preferable to an existence in which the only things to be experienced as certain are, langour, disgust, and sorrow.

Already was he fixed as to the mode of destroying himself. In this perturbed state of mind, happening one day to take a solitary walk in the fields, he met a man whom fortune, in angry mood, had suddenly reduced