This poor woman having caught with her eye, at the farther end of the street, the priests and their attendants coming to carry off the body, got upon her feet, and run off, putting her hands upon her eyes, and crying bitterly. The neighbours endeavoured to stop her, and to administer some consolation; but all to no purpose. As she passed close by me, I took the liberty to ask if it was the loss of a mother or of a daughter that she lamented so piteously. "Alas! sir," said she to me, the tears gushing down her cheeks, “I am mourning the loss of a good lady, who procured me the means of earning my poor livelihood; she kept me employed from day to day." I informed myself in the neighbourhood respecting the condition of this beneficent lady; she was the wife of a petty joiner. Ye people of wealth, what use then do you make of riches, during your life time, seeing no tears are shed over your grave! p. 405.

No feeling can be more agreeable than to find a friend in a man whom we consider

ed as an enemy; and no mortification so poignant as meeting an enemy in the man whom we depended upon as a friend. These harmonic effects frequently render a slight and transient kindness more estimable than a continued series of good offices; and a momentary offence more outrageous than the declared enmity of a whole life time; because, in the first case, feelings diametrically opposite graciously unite; and in the second, congenial feelings violently clash. Hence too it is, that a single blemish, amidst the valuable qualities of a man of worth, frequently appears more offensive than all the vices of a libertine, who displays only a solitary virtue, because from the effect of contrast, these two qualities become more prominent, and eclipse the others in the two opposite characters. It proceeds, likewise, from the weakness of the human mind, which attaching itself always to a single point of the object it contemplates, fixes on the most prominent quality, in framing its decisions. It is impossible to enumerate the errors

into which we are every day falling, for the want of studying these elementary principles of nature. p. 422.

How

There are particular laws which demonstrate the immediate action of Providence on the human race, and which are opposite to the general laws of physics. For example, the principles of reason, of passion, and of sentiment, as well as the organs of speech and of hearing, are the same in men of all countries; nevertheless, the language of nations differs all the world over. comes it that the art of speech is so various among beings who all have the same wants, and that it should be constantly changing in the transmission from father to son, to such a degree, that we modern French no longer understand the language of the Gauls, and that the day is coming when our posterity will be unable to comprehend ours? The ox of Bengal bellows like that of the Ukraine, and the nightingale pours out the same melodious strains to this day, in our climates, as those which charmed

the ear of the bard of Mantua, by the banks of the Po. p. 428.

It is the moral goodness of a period which characterises a language, and which transmits it unaltered to the generation following. This is the reason that the languages, the customs, and even the form of dresses are in Asia, transmitted inviolably from generation to generation, because fathers, all over that continent, make themselves beloved by their children. But these reasons do not explain the diversity of language which subsists between one nation and another. It must ever appear to me altogether supernatural, that men who enjoy the same elements, and are subjected to the same wants, should not employ the same words in expressing them. There is but one sun to illuminate the whole earth, and he bears a different name in every different land. p. 430.

J. J. Rousseau was in the right, when he said, that man was good, but that men were wicked. p. 433.

It is impossible for virtue to subsist independently of religion. I do not mean the theatrical virtues which attract public admiration, and that, many a time, by means so contemptible, that they may be rather considered as so many vices. The very Pagans have turned them into ridicule. See what Marcus Aurelius has said on the subject. By virtue, I understand the good which we do to men, without expectation of reward on their part, and, frequently, at the expense of fortune, nay, even of reputation. Analyze all those whose traits have appeared to you the most striking; there is no one of them but what points out Deity nearer or more remote. I shall quote one not generally known, and singularly interesting from its very obscurity.

In the last war in Germany, a captain of cavalry was ordered out on a foraging party. He put himself at the head of his troop, and marched to the quarter assigned him. It was a solitary valley, in which hardly any thing but woods could be seen. In the midst of it stood a little cottage; on per