THE following essay I received some time ago from a Correspondent, to whom, if I may judge from the hand-writing, I was once before indebted for an ingenious communication.

THE experience which every day affords, of the mortifying difference between those ideal pleasures which we conceive to flow from the possession of certain objects of our wishes, and the feelings consequent upon their actual attainment, has furnished to most moralists a text for declaiming on the vanity of human pursuits, the folly of covetousness, the madness of ambition, and the only true wisdom of being humbly satisfied with the lot and station which Providence has assigned us.

It will not appear extraordinary, that those moralists have hitherto laboured in vain, when it is considered that their doctrine, taken in the latitude in which they usually preach it, would cut off the greatest source of our happiness, overthrow every