and which, according to the soil that receives the precious seed of wisdom, grows up a pernicious poison, or improves into a fair tree of perfection.

of

The silly, illiterate stripling, hastily emancipated from the tuition of monkish ignorance of the fifteenth century, is, in this age improvements, the half-learned, half-travelled, trifling coxcomb of rank and fortune; a compound of frivolity and presumption, a smatterer of languages, a connoisseur of pictures, operas, and women! The late ferocious violator of all. the rites of hospitality, who murdered the husband, that he might possess the wife in uninterrupted se

curity, is now the smooth-tongued, refined adulterer; who wounds the mind of the man he calls his friend, in the tenderest and dearest part, by making use of every insidious and delusive attack on the-at first unsuspecting---heart of the female, to draw away her affections from her lawful partner; while, at the same time, he pretends a disinterested regard for the injured husband. The drunkard of antiquity, who formerly swallowed a gallon of sack for his breakfast, and, at each of his evening liveries,* drank a gallon of

*The livery was a gormandizing meal, eaten in the bedchambers of our ancestors of the fifteenth century, after they had taken their ordinary supper.

beer and two quarts of wine, is the only ancient character that luxury cannot change; for a drunkard at Champaigne, Burgundy, or even "humble Port," is still a drunkard; and sinks the man into a level with the Brute: nay worse; for the crystal stream is the only beverage of the brute creation.

In every Century we find, that the people are the constant imitators of their superiors. If the Prince is the handsomest and finest gentleman of that age which boasts his birth; if HIS manners are the model of elegance, and his smile and address have all the charms of fascination; so His example becomes the more capable of drawing after

it admirers and partizans; and, if his own principles are faulty, they become doubly dangerous from the high eminence in which they are placed.

If Edward the IVth. threw away the pure pearl of Savoy, in her prime and bloom of life, to unite himself to pride and bigotry's faded charms; was he a singular character? Have not other princes, far superior in wisdom and accomplishments, been guilty of similar faults? If princes and nobles in days of yore, were weary of their lawful and chaste wives, and wasted their patrimony and that of their people in the society of those women, who were some of them outcasts from polished society; do we not witness the same fatal pro

pensities in succeeding reigns? Times, which we call civilized, when opposed to those of barbarism.

Man, who was never intended to be a perfect being, is continually the dupe of his own heart. If that heart is possessed of feeling and virtue, it may lead him into error, but never into actual vice. Yet, if once he suffers himself to be carried down by the stream of dissipation, he knows not where to stop: the retrospect of what he once was, in the days of youthful candour and integrity, forms a dreadful comparison with his present vicious follies.. Thus he continues his mad career in heedless