without end. And if in the meantime among all the chances of experiments, he throws any which appear either new or useful, he feeds his mind with these, as so many earnests; boasts and extols them above measure, and conceives great hopes of what is behind."

DISTRESS

WITH AND WITHOUT SYMPATHY.

It seems, therefore, that as we frequently laugh at distress with which, from ignorance or from intelligence, we do not sympathize; this species of laughter is a sign of distress without sympathy, of deformity without pain.

I went last week in the steam-boat to Margate, there were between three and four hundred passengers. It blew a hurricane. I am satisfied that there were not fifty who were not in all the agonies of sea-sickness. Of this number there were three or four John Bulls, whose amusement consisted in asking the different sufferers whether they were hungry, and in violent laughing at the remonstrances which were made to their importunate and impertinent questions. If any of the sufferers had fallen overboard, the laughter would not have existed: very different sensations would have been excited. Sea-sickness was to minds like these distress without sympathy; the chance of being drowned would have been distress with sympathy.

Captain Usher presented to Mr. Kean, the celebrated tragedian, a young lion. I have seen the lion playful as a lamb caressing its master; it grew to an enormous size. Mr. Kean being obliged to quit London to attend

his provincial engagements in different parts of England, was advised to send the lion to Exeter Change, where great care would be taken of it till his return. I happened to be at his house on the day when the lion was removed; he was put into a hackney-coach, and the keeper mounted behind. The coach had no sooner moved upon the stones than the lion, not accustomed to this rough motion, sprung on the front seat, and put his head through the window; the coachman immediately turned round to romonstrate with his fare, but meeting the lion's face, he jumped down from the box and ran away as fast as he could.

This is distress without sympathy. If the lion had seized the coachman, it would have been distress with sympathy.

A clergyman, between the age of fifty and sixty, who had been in deacon's orders upwards of thirty years, applied to be admitted priest. "I, as usual," said the chaplain, "opened my Greek Testament at my favourite chapter in the 2 Corinthians, and desired my antiquated candidate to translate it. Never was Greek more exquisitely englished. I was so struck with the beauty of his style, that I resolved to indulge myself with another chapter: and, opening the Gospel of St. Luke, I begged him to translate as much or as little as he pleased of the third chapter. The old gentleman shut the book, and looking up at me, said; " I have been more than thirty years a curate in his lordship's diocese: I have had a small piece of preferment offered to me and having a wife and ten children, it is a great object to me. My good dame over-persuaded me to offer myself candidate for the priesthood, for which I am unfit,

for I have forgotten all my classics. Being told that you always examined in the Corinthians, I have for many months been committing the different chapters to my memory; but I did not know that you examined in Luke. I must throw myself upon your mercy for forgiveness, and will never again presume to make the attempt." The chaplain said, "I will report your excellent conduct for thirty years, and your sweet nature, to his lordship; and I am satisfied that, in a few days, I shall have the pleasure of seeing you in possession of your preferment."

It will appear upon a comparison of this anecdote with the candidate examined by Dr. Milner (see ante page 11) that whatever resemblance there may be between them, the candidate examined by Dr. Milner was so simple as either to deceive himself, or to imagine that he could deceive the intelligence around him. This distress was without sympathy; but the candidate for orders is, from his meekness and humility, in distress with sympathy.

Distress with sympathy, seldom, if ever, occasions laughter, but may be known by tears such as angels shed, and acts such as angels perform. It is susceptible of an infinite variety of sensations and actions, from the lowest species of passive to the highest species of active benevolence; from the mere sympathetic spectator, who sighs for wretchedness, yet shuns the wretched; who pities with civility or a transient prayer, and passes on to him who is eyes to the blind and feet to the lame : who is a father to the poor, and the cause that he knows not, searches out.

It is thus that the impressions made by human events, whether really occurring or represented in a

writing or picture, depend chiefly upon the knowledge and sensibility of the mind on which they operate. The same circumstance will make one person laugh, which shall render another serious; as the laughter excited in any person may, by afterthought, be corrected, and produce a totally different train of feeling.

A few instances will easily explain this truth.

A large crowd of people were hooting and laughing at a man who had done some act with which they were displeased-" Nay," said an aged woman, " he is some body's bairn." Such are the different views which different spectators take of the same subject; such is the feeling of maternal love, of which there is to me always an affecting image in Hogarth's fifth plate of Industry and Idleness, where an aged woman clings with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished to her vice-hardened child, whom she is accompanying to the ship destined to bear him away from his native soil; in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast's to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered.*

The learned, the judicious, the pious Boerhaave relates that he never saw a criminal dragged to execution without asking himself, 'Who knows whether this man is not less culpable than me?' On the days when the prisons of this city are emptied into the grave, let every spectator of the dreadful procession put the same question to his own heart. Few among those that * C. L.