blended with character, deduced from conduct, and illustrated by incident. I have therefore, in an attempt to discriminate them, adopted the form of a mythological allegory-a form which has been rendered legitimate by the practice of our ablest essayists, and to which the reader will not object, if it serve its intended purpose, by leaving a general impression of the distinction I wish to draw, and by gradually separating, in the course of a fabulous narrative, two ideas, whose shades so insensibly mingle, as to render it difficult to divide them by a sharp and indisputable boundary. S. O.

PRIDE AND VANITY, AN ALLEGORY.

IN the infancy of Nature, according to poetic tradition, all was gentleness and gaiety. The harsher pas sions were not yet unfolded, and the evils which they create were unknown. Innocence and Cheerfulness gambolled in the sunshine of a perpetual spring. Happiness and Hope fed each other with the fruits of the forest, or reclined, in mutual embraces, upon the flowers of the meadow.

Among the delegated Genii, who were then employed in the superintendance of human souls, there was one whose agency appeared to be universal. He was named the Genius of Self-estimation, and his office was to implant and foster the pleasurable consciousness of being entitled to regard and consideration in society. He had a sister whose name was Merit: and in that golden age, the fraternal alliance was so close and endearing, that they perpetually associated together. But when the world advanced in years, the sweetness and serenity of its childhood fled. Characters became refractory and diversified. With tumultuous eagerness, they resisted the training hand of their seraphic guides, and sometimes reversed the bent they had formerly received. Inequality and Ambition were introduced, and the Gorgon countenance of Vice was seen behind them.

This was a scene where the feminine delicacy of Merit could no longer dwell. She ceased to accompany her brother, and retired to a sequestered

hermitage, where she lived with Contentment, her handmaid. Her brother, more vigorous by his sex, would not thus be driven from his functions. He still preserved his influence in every bosom; but, deprived of the delightful society of Merit, was seduced into irregular excesses, in the course of which, Disdain and Folly, two of the occasional companions of Vice, became objects of his gallantry. Disdain bore him a son, in whom the graces of the sire were almost wholly obscured by the coarse and forbidding features of the mother; he was named Pride. Folly had a daughter, a feeblyimproved, but striking image of herself. Her name was Vanity. She was nursed by Adulation, on the banks of a polar lake, which reflected a cold and glaring light. As she grew up, and removed to milder regions, her darling amusements were to view her image in the water, when tricked out with wreathes of Narcissus, or to tend the breeding of butterflies, and hatching of mock-birds, which, without any notes of their own, can mimic those of others. Even when a child, and before the maturity of her passions, she shewed that insatiable thirst for admiration of which she had caught the signs from her more adult companions. Here eyes were blank and unmeaning; but, by an acquired and awkward languishment, like one who parrots phrases from a foreign language, she tried to imitate the expression of sensibility. Her sallow cheeks she daubed, unskilfully, with vermilion, and bolstered out, by mechanical contrivances, her adust and emaciated form. Without a single charm of mind or person, she made it her business to observe and mimic the qualities which attract and captivate, in those who are graced with them by nature. She was playful without vivacity, talkative without ideas, tender without passion, and sentimental without feeling. was her tutoress, and had the entire formation of her character.

Art

Her brother was educated by Misanthropy, in a dark and desart cave, on the highest and most rugged of the Alps, where he delighted to stand and enjoy his solitary elevation. He walked in the mist, to appear a giant ;

and exulted, at sunset, to see half the adjoining mountain eclipsed by his shadow. In this seclusion, his features, which were naturally hard and disagreeable, were never relaxed by a smile; and as his wish was to be viewed with dread, rather than delight, he studied to stiffen them into harshness. His hair and eye-brows grew bristly and savage; and he amused himself with terrifying the Chamois kid by the fierceness of his frown, or in chacing and killing the Marmot, and other little animals, to cherish a consciousness of superiority and power. He never mingled with the sprightly villagers, unless to damp their pastime by the constraint of his presence; and if their mirth proceed ed, notwithstanding this interruption, discontent and mortification made him inwardly curse them, and retire. As he could not stoop to that openness and familiarity which companionship requires, he passed his youth without a friend, but solaced himself by interpreting the disgust with which his society was shunned into the silent acknowledgment of his superiority, and the natural homage paid by a lower to a higher order of beings.

The Genius of Self-estimation, blinded by a parent's fondness, commissioned his children to assist him in his duties. Pride, therefore, in the form of a gnome, took one path; and Vanity, in that of a sylph, the opposite, for they detested each other. Wherever Vanity went, she made her approach be notified by the sound of bells, or the flourish of trumpets. Her toilette was regulated by a handmaid named Fashion, who, every day, changed the colour or form of her dress, to excite a new attention. Her appearance was tawdry and glaring. She substituted ornament for neatness, and studied what was conspicuous, not what was comfortable. In every circumstance, she coveted the appearance, without the enjoyment, of pleasure. She sought not to be the object of love. Her aim was to be noticed. Her emblem might be found in one of her own artificial flowers, which, with the exterior appearance of fragrance and bloom, when grasped by the beholders, is discovered to be a handful of rags.

Pride advanced on his way, in a

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sullen silence, perfectly secure, that, without any effort on his part, the fame of so important a personage would precede him. The common expressions of regard or welcome offended him; for he deemed it an insult to be offered what so many others might equally receive. The customary modes in dress, manners, and opinions, he affected to despise. Ornament and splendour he rejected. If he added ought in his attire to what was barely necessary, it was to give himself an air of austerity and gloom. He adopted the forgotten fashions of a former age, from no other motive than to show his contempt for the present. By a formal gravity he sought the praise of wisdom, and by depressing others, imagined he was raising himself. He was temperate in pleasures-not from principle, but from a dread of descending, in their pursuit, to a familiarity with those around him. He rarely smiled, unless when something ridiculous or perplexing happened to another, and especially to the disciples of his sister, whom he regarded with the most unmitigated scorn. Then a grim smile of cruel enjoyment gleamed across his features. An emblem of him might be traced in those poisonous vegetables which draw nutrition to their own offensive qualities, by withering and mildewing every herb around them.

Vanity, who courted social intercourse, was like the green hill, that, by screening itself among others, had gained a gloss to its surface which the shallow soil was too barren to bestow;-Pride, like the solitary cliff, which, bare as it is, grows barer by standing unsheltered and alone.

Though each was entrusted with a portion of their sire's authority, yet, as they were permitted to employ it at their own discretion on the human mind, their efforts terminated in the formation of characters extremely dissimilar. The proud were generally convinced that the advantages on which they plumed themselves were perceived and appreciated as distinctly by others as by themselves, and therefore they betrayed no anxiety to display them. But the vain seemed ever to doubt the value or validity of their own pretensions; and, from a desire to

H

able and accomplished youth, whose style, topics, and behaviour, he might thus acquire. But while assuming a splendour which his education and manners disgraced, he did it by degrees; still, from a bashful dread of ridicule, leaving some part of his establishment on its original scale. Like a garden on a morass, where one uncultivated corner is sufficient to betray the nature of the soil, this want of congruity and completeness destroyed the effect of all his toil and expence, and constantly reminded his guests, that he had not been early accustomed to the elegancies of life, but was struggling to rise above his native element, on feeble and artificial wings. For their own interest, however, they humoured, while they amused themselves with his forward and awkward imitation of their manners. They devoured his dainties, and laughed at the giver, who gratified at once their appetite for food and for folly.

Pride entered a man of middle age, who had retired from trade, to the enjoyment of senatorian dignity, and thus instructed him :-"Your business now is, by imitating the nobles, to keep at a distance those whom you have hitherto admitted with a familiar affability. If you give an entertainment, let the invitations fix a distant day, that your guests may behold its approach with awful solicitude and preparation. When they arrive, receive them with the same cold and stately condescension which you have yourself formerly experienced from the senators and suffetes, and let the same unsocial solemnity prevail at your table. Never let it appear that one man, by his personal qualities, is more welcome, or can add more to your gratification than another. Learn the art of damping every pleasant sally, by a corrective gravity; and let no man, who is not so rich as yourself, presume to feel himself happy in your presence. Beware of risking the statement of a comparison in any other point; and, therefore, should a man, dis tinguished only for worth or talents, dare to take a lead in conversation, let a reproving manner instantly teach him that he is not wealthy enough to be wise. Should conversation, in spite of every repulse, pro

ceed, wrap yourself up in a sort of suffering silence, with sometimes a slight smile, as if at the shallowness of the speaker, and reserve yourself for the first interval, shortly and dictatorially to decide the subject, without offering any reasons. Draw, as it were, an arctic circle around you, in the centre of which you must remain as fixed, as cold, and as unapproachable as the Pole. Cheerfulness and ease will thus be banished from from your house; and, by adopting the pompous discomfort of patricians, you may be allowed a portion of their repulsive dignity. Be careful, above all, to associate chiefly with those whose pretensions are the same in kind, though somewhat inferior in degree with your own; and prefer being the first man in a village to being the second in Carthage." This advice was followed, but without success. The constraint of a forced and counterfeit character could not be uniformly maintained. The phrases of the forum would sometimes dishonour the saloon: and when the demon was off his guard, his pupil, by relaxing in an evening with an old pot-companion, would undo all the effects of his painful self-denial. Like Penelope, he unravelled by night the web he had wove by day, and had his labour to

commence anew.

The rivals next met in Rome, when their wish was to try how far they could diminish the value of the most perfect characters. Vanity chose a statesman who had rendered himself the most popular orator of his age; and succeeded in tarnishing the splendour of his fame, by betraying him into a constant and disgusting repetition of his services,-by inspiring him with such a false sense of his own importance as led him, in domestic distress, or political adversity, to tire the public ear with his childish whining,-by tempting him meanly to solicit a friend to write a fictitious and flattering account of his conduct,-and at last, by seducing him to fawn upon the destroyer of his country, that he might preserve his ears to listen to his flatterers. Pride took possession of a stubborn, intrepid patriot, and urged him to many of those actions which were ascribed to his acknowledged ability

and virtue. He could not stoop to modify his conduct to a change of circumstances, but maintained an ob stinate inflexibility, when accommodation would have been more beneficial. He would have all, of which he had once signified his approbation, or nothing; when pushed to the last extremity, with savage impatience he tore out his bowels; and, to spare himself the personal mortification of meeting a triumphant rival, he thus deprived the state of her ablest citizen. The last act of his life robbed the rest of half its glory, and unmasked a selfishness which rendered the motives of his public conduct equivocal and suspicious.

In their next effort, the demons, shifting the age, but not the scene, sought each a subject in whom they could exhibit their power under the greatest variety of aspects. The male fiend selected a cardinal, whose brain he inflamed in equal degrees, and, at the same time, with the pride of rank, the pride of wealth, the pride of power, the pride of learning, and the pride of sanctity: and the female chose a titled poet, who was vain of a nobility which he affected to despise, of talents which he abused, of infidelity which his remorse belied, of scorn of mankind, while he was straining every faculty to win their plaudits of indignation against cruelty, while practising it on those he had sworn to cherish,-of excessive sensibility, which was but excess of selfishness, and of love for a country which he laboured to demoralise and debauch.

With the exhibition of these masterpieces the contest closed, but as it left undetermined to whom belonged the diabolical praise of having added most to human misery, the mutual hatred and pretensions of the rival pair were only exasperated by the inconclusive conflict.

Desirous of the strongest barrier between them, they fixed on the Pyrenean mountains. Pride chose the south side, and Vanity the north, which still continue their favourite resorts. Both make occasional excursions to a Green Isle in the opposite ocean; but their influence there, though not destroyed, is considerably diminished by the superior potency of a benignant Genius called Common Sense. Through his means the inhabitants are enabled to perceive objects in their just and natural proportions,-to rate themselves, as well as others, at their real value,and to dissipate the vapours breathed around them by the kindred demons, which would present things to their eyes indistinctly swelled into false and extravagant forms.

May the influence of this useful, though homely household god, be strengthened and extended till Astræa shall return to the earth, and till the Genius of Self-estimation, disgusted with his illicit offspring, shall draw his sister Merit from her retirement, and again make her his only associate! May the Green Isle of the occan be their darling abode, and from thence, as from another Delos, may they waft their benign inspiration over every corner of the globe!

No quaint device adorns his page,

Of hearts commingling-turtles cooing; Or Cupids, in resistless rage,

With quiver fill'd, for man's undoing.

I will not talk of flames and darts,
And other metaphoric fancies;
Of wounded souls, and bleeding hearts,
As lovers do who read romances.

Although your beauties please my sight,
And flattery to the fair is common,
I will not call you angel quite,

I think you lovelier as a woman.