he can withstand the banter of a club. He has sense enough to see through the miserable fallacies of the new philosophy, and spirit enough to expose its malignity. So far he does well, and you are ready to congratulate him on his security. You are mistaken: the prin ciples of the ardent, and hitherto promising adventurer are shaken, just in that very society where, while he was looking for pleasure, he doubted not of safety. In the company of certain women of good fashion and no ill fame, he makes shipwreck of his religion. He sees them treat with levity or derision subjects which he has been used to hear named with respect. He could confute an argument, he could unravel a sophistry; but he cannot stand a laugh. A sneer, not at the truth of religion, for that perhaps is by none of the party disbelieved, but at its gravity, its unseasonableness, its dullness, puts all his resolution to flight. He feels his mistake, and struggles to recover his credit; in order to which, he adopts the gay affectation of trying to seem worse than he really is, he goes on to say things which he does not believe, and to deny things which he does believe, and all to ef face the first impression, and to recover a reputation which he has committed to their hands on whose report he knows he shall stand or fall, in those circles in which he is amb is to shine.

That cold compound of irony, irreligion, selfishness, and sneer, which make up what the French (from whom we borrow the thing as well as the word) so well ex. press by the term persistage, has of late years made an incredible progress in blasting the opening buds of piety

in young persons of fashion. A cold pleasantry, a tem

porary cant word, the jargon of the day (for the "great vulgar" have their jargon) blights the first promise of seriousness. The ladies of ton have certain watch-words, which may be detected as indications of this spirit. The clergy are spoken of under the contemptuous appellation of The Parsons. Some ludicrous association is infallibly combined with every idea of religion. If a warm hearted youth has ventured to name with enthusiasm some eminently pious character, his glowing ardour is extin

guished with a laugh; and a drawling declaration that the person in question is really a mighty harmless good creature, is uttered in a tone which leads the youth secretly to vow, that whatever else he may be, he will never be a good harmless creature.

Nor is ridicule more dangerous to true piety than to true taste. An age which values itself on parody, bur. lesque, irony, and caricature, produces little that is sublime, either in genius or in virtue; but they amuse, and we live in an age which must be amused, though genius, feeling, truth, and principle, be the sacrifice. Nothing chills the ardours of devotion like a frigid sarcasm; and, in the season of youth, the mind should be kept particularly clear of all light associations. This is of so much importance, that I have known persons who, having been early accustomed to certain ludicrous combina. tions, were never able to get their minds cleansed from the impurities contracted by this habitual levity, even after a thorough reformation in their hearts and lives had taken place: their principles became reformed, but their imaginations were indelibly soiled. They could desist from sins which the strictness of Christianity would not allow them to commit, but they could not dismiss from their minds images, which her purity forbade them to entertain.

There was a time when a variety of epithets were thought necessary to express various kinds of excellence, and when the different qualities of the mind were distinguished by appropriate and discriminating terms; when the words venerable, learned, sagacious, profound, acute, pious, ingenious, elegant, agreeable, wise, or witty, were used as specific marks of distinct characters. But the legislators of fashion have of late years thought proper to comprise all merit in one established epithet, and it must be confessed to be a very desirable one as far as it goes. This epithet is exclusively and indiscriminately applied wherever commendation is intended. The word pleasant now serves to combine and express all moral and intellectual excellence.. Every individual, from the gravest professors of the gravest profession, down

to the trifler who is of no profession at all, must earn the epithet of pleasant, or must be contented to be nothing; and must be consigned over to ridicule, under the vulgar and inexpressive cant word of a bore. This is the mortifying designation of many a respectable man, who, though of much worth and much ability, cannot perhaps clearly make out his letters patent to the title of pleasant. For, according to this modern classification, there is no intermediate state, but all are comprised within the ample bounds of one or other of these two terms.

We ought to be more on our guard against this spirit of ridicule, because, whatever may be the character of the present day, its faults do not spring from the redundancies of great qualities, or the overflowing of extravagant virtues. It is well if more correct views of life, a more regular administration of laws, and a more settled state of society, have helped to restrain the excesses of the heroic ages, when love and war were considered as the great and sole business of human life. Yet, if that period was marked by a romantic extravagance, and the present by an indolent selfishness, our superiority is not so triumphantly decisive, as, in the vanity of our hearts, we may be ready to imagine.

I do not wish to bring back the frantic reign of chiv. alry, nor to reinstate women in that fantastic empire in which they then sat enthroned in the hearts, or rather in the imaginations of men, Common sense is an excel. lent material of universal application, which the sagacity of latter ages has seized upon, and rationally applied to the business of common life. But let us not forget, in the insolence of acknowledged superiority, that it was religion and chastity, operating on the romantic spirit of those times, which established the despotic sway of woman; and though she now no longer looks down on her adoring votaries, from the pedestal to which an absurd idolatry had lifted her, yet let her remember that it is the same religion and chastity which once raised her to such an elevation, that must still furnish the noblest energies of her character.

While we lawfully ridicule the absurdities which we have abandoned, let us not plume ourselves on that

spirit of novelty which glories in the opposite extreme. If the manners of the period in question were affected, and if the gallantry was unnatural, yet the tone of virtue was high; and let us remember that constancy, purity, and honour, are not ridiculous in themselves, though they may unluckily be associated with qualities which are so and women of delicacy would do well to reflect, when descanting on those exploded manners, how far it be decorous to deride with too broad a laugh, attachments which could subsist on remote gratification; or grossly to ridicule the taste which led the admirer to sacrifice pleasure to respect, and inclination to honour; to sneer at that purity which made self-denial a proof of affection, and to call in question the sound understanding of him who preferred the fame of his mistress to his own indulgenco,

One cannot but be struck with the wonderful contrast exhibited to our view, when we contemplate the manners of the two periods in question. In the former, all the flower of Europe smit with a delirious gallantry; all that was young and noble, and brave and great, with a fanatic frenzy and preposterous contempt of danger, traversed seas, and scaled mountains, and compassed a large portion of the globe, at the expense of ease, and fortune, and life, for the unprofitable project of rescuing, by force of arms, from the hands of infidels, the sepulchre of that Saviour, whom, in the other period, their posterity would think it the height of fanaticism so much as to name in good company whose altars they desert, whose temples they neglect; and though in more than one country at least they still call themselves by his name, yet too many, it is to be feared, contemn his precepts, still more are ashamed of his doctrines, and not a few reject his sacrifice. Too many consider Christianity rather as a political than a religious distinction; too many claim the appellation of Christians, in mere opposition to that Democracy with which they conceive infidelity to be associated, rather than from an abhor. rence of impiety for its own sake; and dread irreligion as the badge of a reprobated party, more than on ac

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count of that moral corruption which is its inseparable concomitant.

vert.

But in an age when inversion is the order of the day, the modern idea of improvement does not consist in altering, but extirpating. We do not reform, but subWe do not correct old systems, but demolish them; fancying that when every thing shall be new it will be perfect. Not to have been wrong, but to have been at all, is the crime. Excellence is no longer considered as an experimental thing which is to grow gradually out of observation and practice, and to be improved by the accumulating additions brought by the wisdom of successive ages. Our wisdom is not slowly perfected by age and gradual growth, but a goddess which starts at once, full grown, mature, armed cap-à-pie, from the heads of our modern thunderers. Or rather, if I may change the allusion, a perfect system is now expected inevitably to spring at once like the fabled bird of Arabia, from the ashes of its parent; and, like that, can receive its birth no other way but by the destruction of its predecessor.

Instead of clearing away what is redundant, pruning what is cumbersome, supplying what is defective, and amending what is wrong, we adopt the indefinite rage for radical reform of Jack, who in altering Lord Peter's* coat, shewed his zeal by crying out, "Tear away, brother Martin, for the love of heaven; never mind, so you do but tear away."

This tearing system has unquestionably rent away some valuable parts of that strong, rich, native stuff, which formed the ancient texture of British manners. That we have gained much I am persuaded; that we have lost nothing I dare not therefore affirm. But though it fairly exhibits a mark of our improved judgment to ridicule the fantastic notions of love and honour in the heroic ages; let us not rejoice that that spirit of generosity in sentiment, and of ardour in piety, the exuberancies of which were then so inconvenient, are now sunk as unrea.

*Swift's "Tale of a Tub."