rather high chairs to exhibit to the audience, at a properly conspicuous angle, the good results of the "organisation." N.B. Contributions received either in money or timber.

I please myself also with the droll specimens of philanthropy which (as is wont in other cases) will garnish my annual Report; such as "an old bed-post" from one contributor, the proceeds of a "gold-headed cane from another, or "six fathoms of well seasoned oak as a thank-offering for the giver's needing none of it," from a third.

However, do not think that in such items I intend any satire on any genuine acts of philanthropy, however trivial: I am only laughing at the foolish vanity which too often leads men, instead of "giving with simplicity," - as the Apostle so beautifully expresses it, to tempt the derision of the world by parading their benevolence in the odd forms in which it often greets us in print.

I am sorry to find that you are so troubled with indigestion, that even the slightest irregularity is punished. Well; you must comfort yourself with the thought that you are not likely to become a gourmand, and that you need take no "pledge" to preserve your temperance; though, as you have no temptations, that I know of, to be either glutton or drunkard, the security may seem to you rather superfluous. I met the other day with an epigram in the Greek anthology, to the effect, that it would be a

good thing if the headache came before the drinking-bout instead of after it." Here it is:

Εἰ τοῖς μεθυσκόμενοις ἑκάστης ἡμέρας

Αλγειν συνέβαινε τὴν κεφαλὴν πρὸ τοῦ πιεῖν,
Τὸν ἄκρατον ἡμῶν οὐδὲ εἷς ἔπινεν ἄν·

Νῦν δὲ πρότερόν γε τοῦ πόνου τὴν ἡδονὴν
Προλαμβάνοντες ὑστεροῦμεν τἀγαθοῦ.

Certainly with even less than that, we should find the morals of mankind wonderfully improved; I mean, if retribution was but simultaneous with transgression;-if, for example, that thing we call "conscience" were attached to one of the vertebræ, and at the same time that it warned us, began to tug away at some exquisitely sensitive nerve. What alderman would gloat on venison if, after having taken as much as was good for him, conscience, the moment he sent up his plate for a superfluous slice, admonished him of his folly by a sudden fit of the colic, instead of a sleepy, dozy intimation that ten or twenty years hence, if he lived so long, he would repent it; or if a liar, the moment his tongue began to wag, found his face blushing with St. Anthony's fire instead of the faint tints of shame; or if a thief detected the incipient feeling of covetousness by a desperate contemporaneous twinge of gout in his great toe; or if the hypocrite (as, according to Swedenborg's notion of "spiritual correspondencies," he is or ought to be) were told of his fault by a swingeing paroxysm of toothache !

The forms of nervous disease are endless, the vagaries of hypochondriasis infinite. Let me give you a droll instance. I have a friend who exactly illustrates the beneficial effect of that constitution of "conscience" just spoken of. Except that he is odd and hypochondriacal, and therefore perfectly miserable, he is one of the most enviable men I know. He is eminently virtuous, temperate, gentle, compassionate, kind-hearted, with all his appetites singularly under control. I was complimenting him a little the other day on his happy temperament, when I observed an expression of nausea, as if he had taken a dose of tartar emetic.

If

"My dear friend," said he, "I beg you will not give me pain; and, in order to avoid it" (dropping his voice to a mysterious whisper, and looking round to see that no one was within hearing), "Know that the virtue on which you compliment me is, between ourselves, nothing but selfishness; so never compliment me again, for it makes me wretched. My conscience-a morbid one if you will—has, somehow, got entangled with my nervous system, and I cannot think an evil thought without torture. I see the hungry, and feel disposed to pass them unrelieved, I seem immediately seized with pangs of hunger myself; I have no peace till I have satisfied my own stomach by filling those of other people, and may thus be said to feed myself by other people's mouths. In the same manner, if an emotion of covetousness obtrudes itself, I have an immediate sensation in my throat and chest just like that we feel when, in company, we have bolted a hot morsel, and sent it hissing down the throat, because we could neither put it out nor keep it in the mouth. If I have any feeling of disingenuousness, that moment my too physical conscience warns me by a film over my eyes; and if I were to tell a lie, I do believe she would strike me stone blind at once. If I feel any disposition to exceed the most moderate indulgence at table, I have a twinge in the great toe of the right foot, which would reconcile me to oatmeal porridge and pease-bannocks for a fortnight; and if I am tempted to vanity, as I was just now when you flattered me so agreeably, I feel qualms at the stomach as if I had taken an emetic. In short, between ourselves, my virtue, as you call it, is all mere deception, disguised selfishness. wonder whether any one has ever been similarly afflicted!"

I

"Afflicted?" said I, laughing; "I wish all mankind were so afflicted. I wish your disease were contagious, and that you could infect the world; or bite us all round like a mad dog, and inflict on us a moral hydro-phobia!"

"Ah!" said he, with a melancholy air, "do not say so; I am perfectly miserable. For what can be more wretched than involuntary virtue ?-to have seeming benevolence, and feel it is all selfishness? How I sigh," he continued, whimsically, "for the

power to do any one good thing unconstrained!-and, alas! how shall I ever be sure that I am in a condition of confirmed virtue while necesssity thus backs conscience!" Was he (for he was a very modest man), laughing at me all this time, and, as usual with such men, depreciating his own excellences, and guarding against unwelcome flatteries? Or was it really one of the infinite freaks which nerves out of tune will play a hypochondriacal patient?

Whether it were so or not, the last observation reconciled me to the ordinary condition of our probation. Yes, thought I, as I took my leave,-forcing my features, as well as I could, to sympathise with the expression of his lugubrious virtue, it would be indeed sad, if we were never sure that we should act as we ought, when not under an impossibility of acting otherwise; and this consideration sufficiently vindicates our present condition of probation, if we are to be made really and indefectibly virtuous; self-poised by active vital forces from within, not kept upright by painful bands and ligatures; by right motives, not by material springs and pulleys; which last would reduce us to a sort of Punch-and-Judy automata of virtue.

Nevertheless, something may be learned from my friend's droll experiences. In a somewhat similar condition ought virtue to end, though not so to begin; in a sensitiveness to conscience as keen as sensation, but moral, not mechanical, and the reward, not the foundation of virtue. Happy is it when the Christian has so long practised the precepts of his Master that he feels that the wants of others trouble him nearly as much as his own;-till he cannot help "weeping with those who weep, and rejoicing with those who rejoice;"-till he cannot say to the hungry and thirsty, the cold and naked, "Be ye warmed and filled," and do nothing more ;-till, like my poor whimsical friend, he must eat by proxy, and fill, as it were, his stomach by other people's mouths ! Sensation cannot form virtue, but virtue should lead to emotions almost as vivid without being as painful.

Query;-seriously and soberly, and without any talk of nervous necessitation, how much of the virtue of the world is owing to similar non-virtuous motives? How often is that which seems

benevolence, only a form of selfishness? "ALWAYS," says some of our philosophers; "charitable folks are uneasy if they refrain, and so they gratify themselves by giving!" Delightful theory, Master Hobbes ! Then this virtue is on a par with that of my good hypochondriac, whose modesty is kept alive by nausea, and whose compassion is generated by the colic! Perhaps it may be said, "Well; what is the difference to the world? Who can distinguish between the most refined selfishness and the most refined benevolence, since the former, if it really calculate its own interests, will produce just the same effects as the latter?” Exactly the same, I believe; so that a world of truly calculating Epicureans would do just the same things as a world of virtuous Yet somehow, dear Epicureans, we feel that two acts are toto cœlo different when the sources of the said acts are different ; as different as the blush which is called up by modesty from that erubescence which is the effect of a blister.

men.

I am afraid that all this excellent disquisition will hardly reconcile you to your dyspepsia. Wishing that you may soon be so rid of it that you need not doubt whether your abstinence be involuntary or your prudence compulsory, believe me,

Ever, my dear Friend,

Yours affectionately,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER XXVI.

To the Same.

Great Barr, Sept. 1842.

My dear West,

I trust we are at length coming to the end of that formidable "strike" among the colliers, which has kept this part of the country in such commotion during the past few weeks. Poor fellows! it makes one almost despair of ever rescuing them from

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