(if it were nothing worse) a waste and a perversion of power; since the conservative ends they may seem to have in view are far more certainly secured by other means when the sudden peril is gone by. Malign dispositions and vindictive habits are, shall we say, miserable encumbrances of the mind; as if a man would sustain the load of bulky armour, night and day, and carry shield and lance, though probably he will not encounter a foe once in the year. The checks of opinion, the motives of mutual interest; and at last the provisions of law, and the arm of the body politic, are in readiness to defend us from every aggression, those only excepted which must be repelled at the instant they are made, or not at all.

That brisk excitement of the faculties which a sudden perception of danger occasions, not merely bears proportion to the nearness and extent of the peril, but has a relation to its quality and its supposed origin. This excitement, to answer its end, must possess an affinity with the aggressive cause.-The repellant power must be such as is the assailant power. A quick sympathy with the hostile purpose of an antagonist belongs to the emotion at the impulse of which we are to withstand his attack. Simple fear, and its attendant courage, are enough if the danger we have to meet arises from material causes only; or if a mechanical injury is all that is thought of. But anger, and the courage peculiar to anger, is called up when MIND contends

with MIND, that is to say, when an injury is to be warded off which (whether truly so or not) we believe to spring from the inimical intention of a being like ourselves. In this case matter and its properties are forgotten, or are thought of as the mere instruments of the threatened harm, while we rouse ourselves to grapple, soul against soul, with our foe.

For the very same reason that some knowledge, more or less accurate, of the laws of matter (whether acquired by the methods of science, or by common experience) is indispensable as our guide in avoiding or repelling physical evils, so is an intuition of motives necessary to our safety when it is a hostile purpose that originates the danger we are exposed to. Successfully to resist an impending harm, we must rightly conceive of its occult cause.

There may be those who would ask--"Why should we suppose these irascible emotions, liable as they are to abuse, and destructive as they often become, to be original ingredients of our nature; or why needs man be furnished with any impulses more potent or complex than those given him as a defence against physical injuries?" The answer is not difficult.-An additional motive and a more vigorous spring is needed in the one case which is not requisite in the other, because the danger in the one is of a far more recondite quality than in the other, and demands a commensurate provision. If, for our safety, we must

know to what extent, at what distances, and under what conditions, fire may destroy or torment us; we must, for a like reason, know the nature, extent, and conditions of the harm that may arise from the rage of a furious man. Now it does not appear that the extreme exigency of the moment could be met in any way so efficaciously — if at all, as by this sudden sympathy with the ill intention of our enemy-a sympathy which, as by a flash of consciousness, puts us into possession of his evil purpose. The rage or the malice of the aggressor, thus reflected (if dimly yet truly) upon the imagination of whoever is its object, informs him, with the rapidity of lightning, of all he should prepare himself to meet. May we not properly admire the simplicity and the fitness of this machinery?

It is quite another question, and one which does not now press upon us-Whence comes that first malignant purpose or hostile intention against which the irascible emotions are provided? Evil existing as it does, we are here concerned only with the arrangement made for repelling it. Let it then be remembered, that inasmuch as the hostile powers of MIND are far more pernicious, because more various, insidious and pertinacious than those of matter (which can move only in a single direction) there is required more motive and more energy to resist them. Now this necessary accession of power is, might we say, borrowed for the moment when it is wanted, by

sympathy from the aggressor. He who rises in fatal rage upon his fellow, does, by the contrivance of nature, and at the very instant of his violent act, put into the hand of his victim a weapon that may actually avert the stroke. The vicious and exaggerated condition in which these passions usually present themselves (a condition accidental, not necessary) should not prevent our assigning to the wisdom and benignity of the Creator what conspicuously exhibits both. And surely it is becoming to us to rescue (if so we may speak) the praise of the Supreme in those instances where most it is obscured by the evils that have supervened upon his work.

Yet all we see around us of the wisdom and benevolence of the Author of Nature, especially as displayed in the constitution of the sentient orders, would stand contradicted if it appeared that passionate resentments were otherwise than painful.* In fact we do not find them to be entertained as modes of gratification until after they have gone into the unnatural condition of permanent qualities; and even then the gratification, if such it can be called, is wrung out from the very torments of the heart. When indeed these dark emotions have formed alliance with imaginative sentiments, they at once lose a portion of their virulence, and borrow a sense of pleasure, which may become very vivid.

-ὁ δὲ ὀργῇ ποιῶν πᾶς, ποιεῖ λυπούμενος.

Some

remarkable cases of this sort our proper subject will lead us to consider.

There is, however, an instance that may seem to be at variance with our assumptions; and it is one which should be fairly looked at.-Of what sort then is the pleasure of consummated revenge; and whence does it spring?-or must we trace it to the original constitution of the mind? To answer such a question we should go back to the elements of the moral sense.Let it then be remembered that this sense, indispensable as it is to rational agency and to responsibility, implies, not only a consciousness of pleasure in the view of what is good, benign, and generous; but an equal, and correspondent feeling (necessarily painful) towards the opposite qualities, whether of single actions or of character. We cannot so much as form a conception of a moral sense that should possess one of these faculties apart from the other:-as well suppose the eye to be percipient of light, but unconscious of darkness. The power of approval is a nullity, if it do not involve a power of disapproval and disgust. What sort of languid and vague instinct were it, which, though capable of high delight in the contemplation of virtue and beneficence, should look listlessly and without emotion upon the infliction of wanton torture, or upon acts of injustice, fraud, or impurity? We may indeed imagine a world into which no evils and no discords or deformities should gain admis