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Whatever, then, tends to improve and to en large the faculties of the mind, and to soften and refine the feelings of the heart, must infallibly promote delicacy, and, with it, the capability of receiving and imparting the unutterable rapture of a pure and disinterested affection. Love is eternal, and immutable, the same today, yesterday, and for ever; it is founded and it rests, altogether, on the virtue of the beloved object; if that is diminished or ceases the object can no longer be loved, because, virtue, the only incitement to love, is departed. It is not the mere person, or external accomplishments, or any thing adventitious or extrinsic, that can create love; it must be excited by virtue alone; and while that virtue remains it's possessor must be an object of love; take away the virtue and you destroy the motive of affection.

If it was not so, but the mere display of external charms were alone capable of raising the sensation of love; when those charms decayed the love would cease, together, with the cause which rouzed it into action. love outlives all the fading of beauty, it sur

But

vives the dissolution of our tabernacle of clay,

and increases in strength, and augments in power throughout all the inconceivable vast ness of Infinity. That I might not be very tedious, I will state, with all due brevity, the only rule, by which Delicacy and Love can be required and preserved, namely:

By steadily persevering in intellectual pursuits, as the only means of lifting up the heart above all the contaminating and brutalizing effects of an intercourse with an ignorant and iniquitous world, and of purifying, refining, and softening all it's best and most exalted feelings.

That I might in some measure compensate the reader for his toil and trouble in having waded through such a large mass of observations on Delicacy, or, rather, Indelicacy, I will close this Subject in the following lines of the Bard, who was born to uphold the dignity of the Scottish Muse, and to improve. and to enlighten the human race.

"Oh happy love, where love like this is found, "Oh heart-felt rapture, bliss beyond compare, "Much have I paced this weary, mortal round, "And sage experience bids me this declare;

"If heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare, "One cordial in this melancholy vale,

"'Tis when a youthful, modest, loving pair "In other's arms breathe out the tender tale "Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale.

"Is there, in human form, that bears a heart, "A wretch, a villain, lost to love and truth, "That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art "Betray sweet Jenny's unsuspecting youth? "Curse on his perjur'd arts dissembling smooth,

"Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil'd, "Is there no pity, no relenting Ruth

"Points to the parents fondling o'er their child, "Then paints the ruin'd maid, and their dis traction wild?"

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THE race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, quoth Solomon, but time and chance happeneth to them all. I had fondly hoped, that I should be able to continue the Adviser, till the Narrative was completed, the Essays on Women finished, those, also, on Education presented to the Reader, and the remaining papers on Literature vindicated laid before the public. But circumstances of a private and family nature imperiously command me to put this my literary bantling to an untimely death.

For notwithstanding the old adage of “de mortuis nil nisi bonum, de vivis nil nisi verum," the first part of which I hold to be as absurd and pernicious as the last is useful and just, I find that it is not very safe to tread upon. the burning soil of living folly, and existing

vice; I must, therefore, it seemeth, confine myself to animadversions on general subjects, or characters already defunct, unless, indeed, I can flatter and besmear with praise those, who are now playing their part foolishly and wickedly on the great stage of existence; which I am not able to do, because I have no stock of ready-made lies and adulation by me, nor have a genius to manufacture any such commodity; wherefore I must close my quiver of arrows, which do not please much, although I have received more than one letter, telling me, that no one need be alarmed at my writings, for they are perfectly harmless, and that some people have been weak enough to be alarmed, but that they have mistaken the venom of the shaft for the vigour of the bow. But this I suspect not to be altogether true, and that the real reason of the offence, which the Moral and Literary Tribunal has given, is contained in the following words:

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Quod sunt quos genus hoc mininė juvat, upė tote plures

* Culpari dignos; quemvis mediâ erue turbâ; "Aut ob avaritiam, aut miserâ ambitione

laborat;

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