come the miseries of over-activity. But the efforts of the strong and the sound are one long pleasure, so long as excess is avoided-so long as the pleasures of toil and the pleasures of rest are duly balanced.

There is perhaps no saying more common than Duty before pleaI sure,' which obviously implies a general belief in the incompatibility of one with the other; and this is again the same antithesis between exertion and the absence of exertion: that, it implies, which requires exertion is painful, and that which does not require it is pleasurable. The reason of this is, probably, that as by far the greater portion of mankind is, and always has been, compelled to exert itself, the chief object which presents itself as desirable is the absence of the necessity for exertion. From the extraordinary ingenuity evinced by those who have no profession in devising occupations, we are probably justified in inferring, that if the majority of mankind were born to idleness, exertion, and not the absence of it, would become the synonym for pleasure. And such a view would certainly approach more nearly to truth; for there certainly is pleasure in all exertion that is not excessive; and all the pleasures of idleness, to be enjoyed to their full, must be preceded by exertion.

Exertion-the combat with difficulty-and all exertion is a combat with difficulty in some form or other -is the true pleasure; and pleasure, in the common acceptation of the term, is no more than the shadow. But how many abandon the substance to run after the shadow! Less real pleasure perhaps falls to the lot of the professed pleasure-seeker than to the lot of any

sweetest; but stolen pleasures are really those which are bought at the highest price-where there is the greatest difficulty to be surmounted -where there is a spice of danger to give them zest; and it is in the contest with the difficulty and the victory over it that the additional sweetness of the pleasure is found.

There are, however, but few people who have not a practical belief in the pleasures of difficulty; and no one has perhaps a more hearty belief in them than the Englishman, whose prerogative it is to grumble, but who prides himself upon his pluck. He is a very illused man, but he won't give in;' he has a dogged determination to win in the long run; he will struggle, and make sacrifices for a point difficult of attainment, when he might 'live comfortably, and enjoy himself.' When men do this, having a free choice in the matter, it is evident that they must consider the combat with difficulty preferable to indolence. Nothing is more common than to hear men complain of the hardships they are compelled to undergo, when it is in their power to live exempt from the hardships of which they complain. Pluck, which is the Englishman's boast, is but another name for the healthy spirit of opposition to difficulty. It speaks in its motto the English adage, 'Never say die;' a brave old maxim, worth many volumes of philosophy-an exhortation to look on life with a kindly eye-to be patient, energetic, and hopeful.

It may be thought that too much has been said in depreciation of the objects of life-that the advantages of the struggle for them have been given an undue prominence, at the expense of the objects themselves; but the purpose of this essay is to show that it is folly to set an undue value upon the ordinary objects of life, and that even those ordinary objects are not best attained by so doing. The first requisite for every struggle is sound health, and that can be obtained-not by excessive exertion, nor by indolence, but by the amount of exertion suited to the powers of each individual. Every one who, by excessive work in the

YOU

know, I am sure, how as we advance in life, hours come in which we feel an impulse to sit down for a little, and try to revive an old feeling, before it dies away. And many of our old feelings are dying away; and will ultimately die out altogether. It is partly through use; and partly because our system, physical and psychical, is growing less sensitive as we go on. We do not feel things now as we used to do. We are getting stronger: the robuster nerves of middle age do not receive the vivid impressions of earlier years; and there are faintly-flavoured things which they cease to appreciate at all. We have come out from the green fields, and from the shady woodlands; and we are plodding along the beaten highway of life. It is the noon now; not perhaps without some tendency to decline towards evening: and we look back to the dawn and to the morning, when the air was cool and fresh, and when the sky was clear. And we have grown hardened to the rougher work of the present time. We have all got lines, pretty deeply drawn, upon our faces: and a good many grey hairs. And if one could see a middle-aged soul, no doubt you would see about it something analogous to being wrinkled and grey. No doubt you would likewise discern something analogous to the thickening and toughening of the skin in the case of the middle-aged hand. Neither hand nor heart feels so keenly.

There is no help for it; but still one cannot help regretting it, the way in which things lose their first fresh relish by use. We ought to be getting more enjoyment out of things than we do. A host of very small matters, which we pass without ever noticing, would afford us real and sensible pleasure if we had not grown so accustomed to them. Prince Lee Boo, as we used to read, Iwas moved to ecstatic wonder and delight by the upright walls and

the flat ceiling of an ordinary room. They were new to him. There was a young Indian chief, many years ago, who came from the Far West to London, and was for a season a lion in fashionable society. He was a manly, clever young fellow: but in his English months he never got over his unsophisticated enjoyment of the furniture of English houses. And thoughtless folk despised him, when they ought rather to have envied him, as they witnessed his delight in the contemplation of a dinner-table where he had been accustomed to see a stretched bull's hide and of plates, knives and forks, carpets, mirrors, window-curtains, and wash-hand stands. All these great luxuries, and a thousand more, he appreciated at their true value: while civilized men and women, through familiarity, had arrived at contempt of them. Which was right, the civilized folk or the savage man? Is it the human being who sees least in the things around him that ought to be proud: or is not the man rather to be envied who discerns in simple matters qualities and excellences which others do not discern? If you had so worn out your eyes by constant use, that you could no longer see, that would be nothing to plume yourself on: you would have no right to think you had attained a position of superiority to the remainder of the human race, in whom the optic nerve still retained its sensitiveness. Yet there are people who are quite proud that their mind has had its nerves of sensation partially paralyzed; and who would like you to think that those nerves are entirely paralyzed. 'I don't remark these things,' they will say with an air of disdain, when you point out to them some of the little material advantages which we enjoy in this country now-a-days. They convey that they think you must be a weak-minded person because you do remark these things: because you still feel it a curious thing to

leave London in the morning, and after ten hours and a half of unfatiguing travelling to reach Edinburgh in the evening: or because you still are conscious of a simpleminded wonder when you send a message five hundred miles and get your answer back in a quarter of an hour. If there be a mortal whom I despise, it is the man who is anxious to impress you with the fact that he does not care in the least for anything. The human being who is proud because he has reached the nil admirari stage, is just a human being who is proud because a creeping paralysis has numbed his soul.

Yet without giving in to it, and without being proud of it, you are aware that the keen relish goes from that which you grow accustomed to. I have indeed heard it said concerning certain individuals whose supercilious and lofty air testified that some sudden rise in life had turned their head, that they lived in a state of constant surprise at finding themselves so respectable. But this statement was not true in its full extent. For after being for several years in a position for which nature never intended him, even Dr. Bumptious (before his elevation his name was Toady) must have grown to a certain measure accustomed to it. Even other people got accustomed to it. And though his incompetence for his place remained just as glaring as ever, they ceased to remark it; and came to accept it as something in the nature of things. You know, we do not perplex ourselves by inquiring every morning why there are such creatures as wasps, toads, and rattle-snakes. But if these beings were of a sudden introduced into this world for the first time, it would be different.

It is to be lamented, that the very fresh and sensible enjoyment which we derive from very little things when they are new to us, passes so completely away when they grow familiar. I remark that my fellowcreatures, who inhabit houses in this street, are very far from being duly thankful for the great privilege we possess, in having a post-office at the end of it. You write your

letters in the forenoon, after you have completed your more serious work; and upon each envelope you stick the representation of a face which is very familiar to us all, and very dear. If you are a wise man, you post your letters for yourself: and accordingly the first thing you do daily, when you go forth to your out-door business or duty, is to proceed to that little opening which receives the expression of so much care, so much kindness, so much worry, so much joy and sorrow, and to drop the documents in. Not many of the human beings who post letters and who receive them have any habitual sense of the supreme luxury they enjoy in that familiar institution of the post-office. Into that little opening goes your letter: a penny secures its admission, and obtains for it very distinguished consideration: and in a little while the most ingenious mechanism that has been devised by the most ingenious minds is hard at work conveying your letter, at tremendous speed, by land or sea: till next morning, unerring as the eagle upon its eyrie, it swoops down upon the precise dwelling at which you aimed it. When I say it swoops down upon a dwelling in the country, I mean to express poetically the fact that it comes jogging along in a cart drawn by a little white pony, which stops for the purposes of conversation whenever it meets anybody in the wooded lane I have in my mind. But in saying that the inhabitants of this street are not duly thankful for the post-office at the corner, I did not mean merely that they fail to understand what a blessing to Britain the system of postal communication is. Everybody, on ordinary days, fails to understand that. I was thinking of something else. I was thinking of the luxury of having a receivinghouse so near. When I lived in the country, the post-office was five miles distant: and if you missed the chance of sending away your letters in the morning by the cart drawn by the white pony, you must wait till next day; or you must send a special messenger to the old