of a friend upon me. How the reading of me. But out of the black depths, could I be it casually in a book, as where Adams takes heard, I would cry out to all those who have his whiff in the chimney-corner of some but set a foot in the perilous flood. Could inn in Joseph Andrews, or Piscator in the the youth, to whom the flavour of his first Complete Angler breaks his fast upon a wine is delicious as the opening scenes of morning pipe in that delicate room Piscator- life or the entering upon some newly disibus Sacrum, has in a moment broken down covered paradise, look into my desolation, the resistance of weeks. How a pipe was and be made to understand what a dreary ever in my midnight path before me, till the thing it is when a man shall feel himself vision forced me to realise it,-how then going down a precipice with open eyes its ascending vapours curled, its fragrance and a passive will,-to see his destruction lulled, and the thousand delicious minister- and have no power to stop it, and yet to feel ings conversant about it, employing every it all the way emanating from himself; to faculty, extracted the sense of pain. How perceive all goodness emptied out of him, from illuminating it came to darken, from a and yet not to be able to forget a time when quick solace it turned to a negative relief, it was otherwise; to bear about the piteous thence to a restlessness and dissatisfaction, spectacle of his own self-ruins :-could he thence to a positive misery. How, even now, see my fevered eye, feverish with last night's when the whole secret stands confessed in drinking, and feverishly looking for this all its dreadful truth before me, I feel myself night's repetition of the folly; could he feel linked to it beyond the power of revocation. the body of the death out of which I cry Bone of my bone▬▬ hourly with feebler and feebler outcry to be delivered,-it were enough to make him dash the sparkling beverage to the earth in all the pride of its mantling temptation; to make him clasp his teeth, Persons not accustomed to examine the motives of their actions, to reckon up the countless nails that rivet the chains of habit, or perhaps being bound by none so obdurate as those I have confessed to, may recoil from this as from an overcharged picture. But what short of such a bondage is it, which in spite of protesting friends, a weeping wife, and a reprobating world, chains down many a poor fellow, of no original indisposition to goodness, to his pipe and his pot? and not undo 'em To suffer WET DAMNATION to run thro' em. Yea, but (methinks I hear somebody object) if sobriety be that fine thing you would have us to understand, if the comforts of a cool brain are to be preferred to that I have seen a print after Correggio, in state of heated excitement which you describe which three female figures are ministering and deplore, what hinders in your instance to a man who sits fast bound at the root of that you do not return to those habits from a tree. Sensuality is soothing him, Evil which you would induce others never to Habit is nailing him to a branch, and Repug-swerve? if the blessing be worth preserving, nance at the same instant of time is applying is it not worth recovering ? me back to those days of youth, when a draught from the next clear spring could slake any heats which summer suns and youthful exercise had power to stir up in the blood, how gladly would I return to thee, pure element, the drink of children, and of child-like holy hermit! In my dreams I can sometimes fancy thy cool refreshment purling over my burning tongue. But my waking stomach rejects it. That which refreshes innocence only makes me sick and faint. a snake to his side. In his face is feeble Recovering !-O if a wish could transport delight, the recollection of past rather than perception of present pleasures, languid enjoyment of evil with utter imbecility to good, a Sybaritic effeminacy, a submission to bondage, the springs of the will gone down like a broken clock, the sin and the suffering co-instantaneous, or the latter forerunning the former, remorse preceding action-all this represented in one point of time. When I saw this, I admired the wonderful skill of the painter. But when I went away, I wept, because I thought of my own condition. But is there no middle way betwixt total Of that there is no hope that it should abstinence and the excess which kills you? ever change. The waters have gone over-For your sake, reader, and that you may never attain to my experience, with pain a song to welcome the new-born day. Now, the first feeling which besets me, after stretching out the hours of recumbence to their last possible extent, is a forecast of the wearisome day that lies before me, with a secret wish that I could have lain on still, or never awaked. Life itself, my waking life, has much of the confusion, the trouble, and obscure perplexity, of an ill dream. In the day time I stumble upon dark mountains. I must utter the dreadful truth, that there is none, none that I can find. In my stage of habit (I speak not of habits less confirmed -for some of them I believe the advice to be most prudential) in the stage which I have reached, to stop short of that measure which is sufficient to draw on torpor and sleep, the benumbing apoplectic sleep of the drunkard, is to have taken none at all. The pain of the self-denial is all one. And what that is, I had rather the reader should believe on Business, which, though never very parmy credit, than know from his own trial. ticularly adapted to my nature, yet as someHe will come to know it, whenever he shall thing of necessity to be gone through, and arrive in that state, in which, paradoxical as therefore best undertaken with cheerfulness, it may appear, reason shall only visit him I used to enter upon with some degree of through intoxication: for it is a fearful truth, alacrity, now wearies, affrights, perplexes that the intellectual faculties by repeated me. I fancy all sorts of discouragements, acts of intemperance may be driven from and am ready to give up an occupation which their orderly sphere of action, their clear gives me bread, from a harassing conceit of daylight ministeries, until they shall be incapacity. The slightest commission given brought at last to depend, for the faint me by a friend, or any small duty which manifestation of their departing energies, I have to perform for myself, as giving orders upon the returning periods of the fatal to a tradesman, &c. haunts me as a labour madness to which they owe their devasta- impossible to be got through. So much the tion. The drinking man is never less himself springs of action are broken. than during his sober intervals. Evil is so far his good.* Behold me then, in the robust period of life, reduced to imbecility and decay. Hear me count my gains, and the profits which I have derived from the midnight cup. Twelve years ago, I was possessed of a healthy frame of mind and body. I was never strong, but I think my constitution (for a weak one) was as happily exempt from the tendency to any malady as it was possible to be. I scarce knew what it was to ail anything. Now, except when I am losing myself in a sea of drink, I am never free from those uneasy sensations in head and stomach, which are so much worse to bear than any definite pains or aches. At that time I was seldom in bed after six in the morning, summer and winter. I awoke refreshed, and seldom without some merry thoughts in my head, or some piece of When poor M- painted his last picture, with a pencil in one trembling hand, and a glass of brandy and water in the other, his fingers owed the comparative steadiness with which they were enabled to go through their task in an imperfect manner, to a temporary firmness derived from a repetition of practices, the general effect of which had shaken both them and him so terribly. The same cowardice attends me in all my intercourse with mankind. I dare not promise that a friend's honour, or his cause, would be safe in my keeping, if I were put to the expense of any manly resolution in defending it. So much the springs of moral action are deadened within me. My favourite occupations in times past now cease to entertain. I can do nothing readily. Application for ever so short a time kills me. This poor abstract of my condition was penned at long intervals, with scarcely any attempt at connexion of thought, which is now difficult to me. The noble passages which formerly delighted me in history or poetic fiction, now only draw a few weak tears, allied to dotage. My broken and dispirited nature seems to sink before anything great and admirable. I perpetually catch myself in tears, for any cause, or none. It is inexpressible how much this infirmity adds to a sense of shame, and a general feeling of deterioration. These are some of the instances, concerning which I can say with truth, that it was not always so with me. Shall I lift up the veil of my weakness any further ?-or is this disclosure sufficient? I am a poor nameless egotist, who have no vanity to consult by these Confessions. I know not whether I shall be laughed at, or heard seriously. Such as they are, I com mend them to the reader's attention, if he find his own case any way touched. I have told him what I am come to. Let him stop in time. POPULAR FALLACIES. I. THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD. eminence :-" Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice. II. THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS. THIS axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour in the THE weakest part of mankind have this same vocabulary. The comic writers, with saying commonest in their mouth. It is the their poetical justice, have contributed not a trite consolation administered to the easy little to mislead us upon this point. To see dupe, when he has been tricked out of his a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon money or estate, that the acquisition of it the stage, has something in it wonderfully will do the owner no good. But the rogues diverting. Some people's share of animal of this world-the prudenter part of them, spirits is notoriously low and defective. It at least,-know better; and if the obserhas not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish vation had been as true as it is old, would out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These not have failed by this time to have love to be told that huffing is no part of discovered it. They have pretty sharp valour. The truest courage with them is distinctions of the fluctuating and the that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is But confront one of these silent heroes with a proverb, which they can very well afford the swaggerer of real life, and his confidence to leave, when they leave little else, to the in the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest, inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour; neither does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted modesty-we do not mean him of Clarissa-but who ever doubted his courage? Even the poetsupon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding-have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But THE severest exaction surely ever invented Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies upon the self-denial of poor human nature! singly before him-and does it. Tom Brown This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat had a shrewder insight into this kind of without partaking of it; to sit esurient at character than either of his predecessors. his own table, and commend the flavour of He divides the palm more equably, and his venison upon the absurd strength of his allows his hero a sort of dimidiate pre- never touching it himself. On the contrary, losers. They do not always find manors, got But some III. THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS we love to see a wag taste his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk or a merry conceit flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy-begotten of the occasion; if he that utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to be tickled with it; and any suppression of such complacence we hold to be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply but that your company is weak or foolish enough to be moved by an image or a fancy, that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? This is exactly the humour of the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself to "see nothing considerable in it." IV.—THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING. —THAT IT IS EASY TO PERCEIVE HE IS NO GENTLEMAN. A SPEECH from the poorest sort of people, which always indicates that the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny is that which galls and exasperates them to use this language. The forbearance with which it is usually received is a proof what interpretation the by-stander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still less politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric, they ply one another more grossly ;-He is a poor creature.—He has not a rag to cover &c.; though this last, we confess, is more frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in the world, should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there no other topics-as, to tell him his father was hanged-his sister, &c. without exposing a secret which should be kept snug between them; and doing an affront to the order to which they have the honour equally to belong? All this while they do not see how the wealthier man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both. V. THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH. A SMOOTH text to the letter; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that he—and not perverse nature, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive itself from no higher principle than the apprehension of setting ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them from all squeamishness on that score: they may even take their fill of pleasures, where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, hampered and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention, but it can trade upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their capital. The poor are not quite such servile imitators as they take them for. Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and there we find an original. Who taught the poor to steal, to pilfer? They did not go to the great for schoolmasters in these faculties surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be-no copyists. In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants may be said to take after their masters and mistresses, when they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from indisposition or some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines notwithstanding. "O, but (some will say) the force of example is great." We knew a lady who was so scrupulous on this head, that she would put up with the calls of the most impertinent visitor, rather than let her servant say she was not at home, for fear of teaching her maid to tell an untruth; and this in the very face of the fact, which she knew well enough, that the wench was one of the greatest liars upon the earth without teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two words of consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go for nothing: example must be everything. This liar in grain, who never opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote inference, which she (pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from a form of words literally false, but essentially deceiving no one-that under some circum stances a fib might not be so exceedingly sinful—a fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or one that she could be suspected of adopting, for few servant-wenches care to be denied to visitors. This word example reminds us of another fine word which is in use upon these occasions-encouragement. "People in our sphere must not be thought to give encouragement to such proceedings." To such a frantic height is this principle capable of being carried, that we have known individuals who have thought it within the scope of their influence to sanction despair, and give éclat to-suicide. A domestic in the family of a county member lately deceased, from love, or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; and great interest was used in his behalf, upon his recovery, that he might be permitted to retain his place; his word being first pledged, not without some substantial sponsors to promise for him, that the like should never happen again. His master was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress thought otherwise; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship declaring that she "could not think of encouraging any such doings in the county." VI.-THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST. Nor a man, woman, or child, in ten miles round Guildhall, who really believes this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it himself. It was made in revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale. It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the palate, which knows better things. If nothing else could be said for a feast, this is sufficient, that from the superflux there is usually something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to a class of proverbs which have a tendency to make us undervalue money. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is not health; riches cannot purchase everything the metaphor which makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine clothing to the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to acres-a sophistry so barefaced, that even the literal sense of it is true only in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws assuming to inculcate content, we verily believe to have been the invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs upon the purse of his wealthier neighbour, which he could only hope to carry by force of these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of the artful metonymy which envelopes it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures, the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's ease, a man's own time to himself, are not muck-however we may be pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that provides them for us. VII.-OF TWO DISPUTANTS THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG. OUR experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper, indeed, is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof at least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus, the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's-inn— we have seldom known this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not convinced he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have seconded him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense for an hour together, writhing and labouring to be delivered of the point of dispute the very gist of the controversy knocking at his teeth, which like some obstinate iron-grating still obstructed its deliverance-his puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all over at an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, that cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely laying his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be calm (your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking sneer carry the argument clean from him in the opinion of |