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vain look for among the most illustrious of the Greeks and Romans. They were surely not barbarians who first gave dignity to the intercourse of the sexes, by bestowing on it the delicacy of feeling which constitutes the charm of love. Thoughtless women, little do you know how large is the debt of gratitude you owe to the age of chivalry!

If modern times have any advantages over the classical days of antiquity, and who will dispute their vast superiority in morals and knowledge ?-their origin may be traced up to the character and institutions of the dark ages. They are the parents of modern science. Their discoveries led the way to our intellectual greatness. On their foundations are built the vast edifice of modern philosophy: as the activity of the human mind is always pushing forward the limits of knowledge, we have indeed gone beyond them in all useful acquirements, but we have not surpassed them more than they have surpassed the ancients.

Let us not be led away by the notion that our ancestors were rough in their manners, and coarse in their habits. The mere politeness of form is so much a matter of convention, it varies so much in different countries and in different ages, that it is unjust to measure other times by the standard of our own. In kindness of heart, in attention to the feelings of others, the heroes of Joinville and Froissart were not behind their descendants. The Cid Campeador might yet serve as a model of courtesy. If these times were wanting in that artificial breeding which arises entirely from a vast inequality of fortune, they fully made up for their defi ciency by more valuable qualities. Ornament is only valuable when it does not interfere with what is useful. The frost which congeals water adds much to its bril

iancy, but destroys its utility. Children may admire how it sparkles in the sun, but men will reflect that it slakes no thirst, it revives no fainting heart.

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You have often heard me say how fond I am of hard weather, and how much I regret the encreased mildness of our late winters. My maxim, you know, is, that a hard frost out of doors, and a blazing fire within, form the pleasantest of all possible temperatures and atmospheres. But I have, during this last week, witnessed a scene of such distress, aggravated in an extreme degree by the severity of the season, that my heart must be as cold and as hard as the ice of which I am so fond, if it were not to feel with keenness that the same causes which add to my pleasures, encrease, in an equal, if not a greater, proportion the sufferings of those who seem born, alas! only to suffer.

Of course, it is of the poor, the very poor, I speak,for it is they alone who physically feel the severities of our northern seasons. I know there are many who

shrink when the weather-cock points from the East,who affect to be living conjunctions of the thermometer and barometer, feeling inwardly and intensely every gradation of heat and vicissitude of weather. But it is the very absence of real suffering from the elements that causes this affected, or, at any rate, trivial sensitiveness to their minuter changes. When these victims of ideal delicacy and imaginary illness do venture to go forth, they are enveloped in a multiplicity of casings

which preserve their bodies, like mummies, from the least touch of the outward air; and at home they have all those means and inventions to create heat and exclude cold which luxury has, of late years, superadded to comfort. But the poor have none of these ;-their coarse and insufficient covering has no winter encrease, and their ill-built dwellings-with their creviced walls, broken casements, and doors that do not close,-remain unheated by the miserable fire which is scarcely sufficient to cook their scanty and unsavoury food.

Most of us are apt to be hard upon the poor, and nearly all, I think, are too careless concerning them. We are earnest in preaching to them content, and look little to what causes they have for it.. We strictly enforce their duties, are discountenancing and harsh towards their few relaxations and pleasures,-and if they sink into misdoing, justice, severe and unpitying, is the utmost they have to expect. These assertions are not sweepingly and hastily made;-you yourself, though not living much in the country, must, I am sure, have seen many individual instances of all of them. Wheneverand heaven knows it is sufficiently rarely-the labouring man indulges at the village wake, or the market-town fair, are we not in haste to call him idle and dissolute? Do we not say, "He complains of the hardness of the times, why is he not at his work? No wonder he should be poor, if he spends his time in diversion and debauchery"? Alas! should we call him who labours through the day idle if he pause one moment to wipe his throbbing brow? Should we be in haste to withhold the one honey-drop in a full-measured cup of bitterness? Look at the life of a country day-labourer in England, and say whether it be one in which the duties are too few, and the pleasures too many. As long as toil, severe and

continual, and poverty, intense and unremitting-are reckoned evils, so long must the condition of our working poor be considered one which demands at our hands the utmost compassion and forbearance. A poor man is a man still; he has the same impulses, appetites, and affections that we have ;-but to us they give enjoyment by their indulgence,-to him suffering, by their denial and restraint. It is said, for instance, that it is worse than improvident for a labouring man to marry, until he has acquired some probability of being able to support his family, or at least has laid by some small sum to set him afloat in the world. In this case, marriage would be denied to him altogether,-for, if he were to wait till he could marry with prudence, he could never marry at all. And are we to expect that a man is to lose his nature because he is poor? Are we to enforce in his case a forbearance which the very beasts of the field are not called on to practice? The passions are coarser, perhaps, in lowly bosoms than in ours, but they are not less strong. It has been much the fashion of late to sneer at the loves of clowns and country-lasses, but I have known as deep instances of attachment,-I have known affection as intense, as fervent, and even as morally, though not perhaps as socially, refined-in humble life, as ever was felt in the highest.

If we go lower in the moral scale, and from innocent suffering descend to guilt, still we find almost as many causes to pity as to blame; at all events, we have strong reason to be thankful for our own more happily-cast lot. For, the same impulses which lead us into venial error, sink them into serious crime, the same passions which cause in us only moral mis-doing, occasion in them offences of deep guiltiness, visited by severe and ignominious penalty. Why is it that so many crimes are committed among the

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lower orders of society, in comparison with those in the richer? Because they have such infinitely more temptation. A rich man has around him the necessaries, the comforts, the luxuries of life ;-what excuse has he to commit those offences which, as directly injurious to society, have been branded with shame, and made liable to punishment? The poor man is starving, and he steals ;-then the cry is raised of depravity, and the necessity of severe example and he is hanged. Ought we not to bless that better fortune which has placed us beyond the reach of temptations, under which, it is very probable, we also might have fallen? But the contrary is the case; whenever a man in the condition of a gentleman commits an act which is visited by legal punishment, all manner of pity is excited by his misfortune,-all kinds of influence are exerted to procure his pardon. The poor man who sinned, perhaps probably-in consequence of the extremity of temptation, is punished, without a question or a remark, as a matter of course, while the gentleman, who has had comparatively no temptation, meets with all consideration and leniency.

It is this very matter-of-courseness which renders us so blind, or, at least, so insensible, to the sufferings of the poor. Many persons, who are naturally humane, think slightly of what is of such every-day occurrence. But this every-day occurrence, which renders the compassion less, makes the suffering the more, That which is constant, and to escape from which there is no hope, is surely the severest to endure. The representation which is given us of the punishment of another state is, that it is unremitting and eternal.

There is also another class of persons who do not pity the poor, because they have been taught to consider them more worthy of envy. Their ideas of poverty are

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