robed by Reason, and shone out, in her original form, with native effulgence and resistless. beauty.

This is plausible; but will not history and biography answer all the ends of fiction, unattended with its injurious effects? Here all is life, variety, and interest. Here is every thing to amuse, to recreate. Here the finest moral lessons are inculcated in the detail of facts. Here are passions, motives, actions, all forming the most exquisite delineations of character, set home upon the heart with the aid of the powerful conviction that these are facts. I am sure that none can have attended to the more secret and subtle operations of their own minds, without perceiving that a display of virtue or vice, embodied in a fact, has inconceivably more power over the mind, than the same character exhibited by the most extraordinary genius in a fiction. While reading the latter, we may have been deeply affected, we may have glowed with anger at the sight of vice, melted with pity at the display of misery, or soared in rapture at the exhibition of excellence; but when the book is laid down, and the mind recovers from the illusion, does not the recollection, that all this was the creation of imagination, exert a cold and chilling influence upon the heart, and go far to efface almost every favourable impression, till, by a kind of revenge for the control which a fiction has had over us, we determine to forget all we have felt? We cannot do this in rising from a fact.

Fiction is generally overwrought. It is vice in carricature, or virtue in cnamel: the former

is frequently too bad to be dreaded as likely to happen to us: the latter too high to be an object of expectation. All the attendant circumstances are too artificially contrived. There is little that is like it in real life. Our passions are too much excited, our hopes are too much raised and when we come from this ideal world into the every day scenes of ordinary life, we feel a sense of dulness, because every thing looks tame and common-place. The effect of such works is great for the time, but it is not a useful effect: it is like the influence of ardent spirits, which fits men for desperate adventures, but not for the more steady and sober efforts of ordinary enterprise.

Observe then, although I do not totally condemn all works of fiction, for then I should censure the practice of Him who spake as never man spake, whose parables were fictitious representations; yet I advise a sparing and cautious perusal of them, whether written in poetry or prose. History, biography, travels, accounts of the manners and customs of nations, will answer all the ends of fiction; they will amuse, and they will in the most easy and pleasing way instruct. They will exhibit to us every possible view of human nature, and every conceivable variety of character. They will introduce us to a real world, and exhibit to us the failings and the excellencies of men of like passions with ourselves! and who, according to the complexion of their character, may be regarded as beacons to warn us, or the polar star to guide us.

Again, and again, I say, cultivate my children, a taste for the acquisition of knowledge:

thirst after information, as the miser does after wealth; treasure up ideas with the same eagerness as he does pieces of gold. Let it not be said, that for you the greatest of human beings have lived, and the most splendid of human minds have written in vain. You live in a world of books, and they contain worlds of thought. Devote all the time that can be lawfully spared from business to reading. Lose not an hour. Ever have some favourite author at hand, to the perusal of whose productions the hours and half hours, which would otherwise be wasted, might be devoted, Time is precious. Its fragments, like those of diamonds, are too valuable to be lost. Let no day pass without your attempting to gain some

new

idea. Your first object of existence, as I have already stated, should be the salvation of your soul: the next, the benefit of your fellow-creatures; and then comes the improvement of your mind.*

CHAPTER XV.

On amusements and recreations.

Ir is a trite remark, that the mind, like a bow, will lose its power by being always strained; and that occasional relaxation from the cares of

*I most earnestly recommend to all young persons the perusal of Mr. H. F. Burder's Treatises on Mental Culture; then the well known work of Dr. Watts, "On the improvement of the Mind;" and if they are disposed to pursue the subject, Dugald Stewart's clegant and valuable work on Mental Philosophy.

business, is necessary to preserve the vigour and elasticity of the human faculties. Allowing this to be true, it becomes a question, in what way recreation may be lawfully sought; or, in other words, what kind of amusement may be innocently resorted to. Here two rules may be laid down.

1. All recreations are improper, which have an injurious influence upon the moral and religious character. This is an axiom. No reasoning is necessary to support it; no eloquence is requisite to illustrate it: none but an atheist can oppose it.

2. All recreations are improper, which, by their nature, have a tendency to dissipate the mind, and unfit it for the pursuits of business; or which encroach too much on the time demanded for our necessary occupations. This rule is as intelligible and as just as the former.

These two directions, the propriety of which all must admit, will be quite sufficient to guide us in the choice of amusements.

First, there are some diversions, which, by leading us to inflict pain produce cruelty of disposition.

A reluctance to occasion misery even to an insect, is not a mere decoration of the character, which we are left at liberty to wear or to neglect; but it is a disposition which we are commanded, as matter of duty, to cherish. It is not mere sensibility, but a necessary part of virtue. It is impossible to inflict pain, and connect the idea of gratification with such an act, without experiencing some degree of mental obduration. We are not surprised that he who, while a boy, amused himself in killing flies, should, when he VOL. II.

2*

became a sovereign, exhibit the character of a cruel and remorseless tyrant. To find pleasure in setting brutes to worry and devour each other, is a disposition truly diabolical; and the man who can find delight in dog-fighting, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, is quite prepared to imitate those cannibals who, in the popular insurrections and massacres of the French Revolution, sported with the mangled carcasses and palpitating limbs of their murdered victims, and dragged them about with their teeth in the gardens of the Thuilleries.

Horse-racing, in addition to the cruelty with which it is attended, is generally a means of assembling on the course, all the gamesters, swindlers, and black-legs in the neighbourhood, and is the cause of much drunkenness, debauchery, and ruin.

All field sports, of every kind, are, in my view, condemned by the laws of humanity. Shooting, coursing, hunting, angling, are all cruel. What agony is inflicted in hooking a worm or a fish: in maiming a bird: in chasing and worrying a hare and to find sport in doing this, is inhuman and unchristian. To say that these animals are given for food, and must be killed, is not a reply to my argument. I am not contending against killing them, or eating them, but againstthe act of killing them for sport. The infliction of death, under any circumstances, and upon any creature, however insignificant in the scale of creation, is too serious a matter to be a source of amusement. No two terms can be more incongruous than death and sport. It seems perfectly monstrous, that after having subjected the irrational creation to the terrors