the natural modesty of reformers, that the taste in this our interlunar heaven will be benefited from time to time by the know. ledge of new-comers. We cannot well fancy a celestial ancient Briton delighting himself with painting his skin, or a Chinese angel hobbling a mile up the Milky Way in order to show herself to advantage.

For breakfast, we must have a tea beyond anything Chinese. Slaves will certainly not make the sugar; but there will be cows for the milk. One's landscapes cannot do without cows.

For horses we shall ride a Pegasus, or Ariosto's Hippogriff, or Sinbad's Roc. We mean, for our parts, to ride them all, having a passion for fabulous animals. Fable will be no fable then. We shall have just as much of it as we like; and the Utilitarians will be astonished to find how much of that sort of thing will be in request. They will look very odd, by the bye, those gentlemen, when they first arrive; but will soon get used to the delight, and find there was more of it in their own doctrine than they imagined.

The weather will be extremely fine, but not without such varieties as shall hinder it from being tiresome. April will dress the whole country in diamonds; and there will be enough cold in the winter to make a fire pleasant of an evening. The fire will be make of sweet-smelling turf and sunbeams; but it will have a look of coal. If we choose, now and then w: shall even have inconveniences.

CHAPTER II.

Bad Weather.

AFTER longing these two months for some "real winter wea ther," the public have had a good sharp specimen, a little too real. We mean to take our revenge by writing an article upon it after a good breakfast, with our feet at a good fire, and in a room quiet enough to let us hear the fire as well as feel it. Outside the casement (for we are writing this in a cottage) the eastwind is heard, cutting away like a knife; snow is on the ground; there is frost and sleet at once; and the melancholy crow of poor chanticleer at a distance seems complaining that nobody will cherish him. One imagines that his toes must be cold; and that he is drawing comparisons between the present feeling of his sides, and the warmth they enjoy next his plump wife on a perch.

But in the country there is always something to enjoy. There is the silence, if nothing else; you feel that the air is healthy; and you can see to write. Think of a street in London, at once narrow, foggy, and noisy; the snow thawing, not because the frost has not returned, but because the union of mud and smoke prevails against it; and then the unnatural cold sound of the clank of milk-pails (if you are up early enough); or if you are not, the chill, damp, strawy, rickety hackney-coaches going by, with fellows inside of them with cold feet, and the coachman a mere bundle of rags, blue nose, and jolting. (He'll quarrel with every fare, and the passenger knows it, and will resist. So they will stand with their feet in the mud, haggling. The old gentleman saw an extra charge of a shilling in his face.) To complete the misery, the pedestrians kick, as they go, those detestable flakes of united snow and mud ;—at least they ought to do so, to complete our picture; and at night-time,

people coming home hardly know whether or not they have chins.

But is there no comfort then in a London street in such weather? Infinite, if people will but have it, and families are good-tempered. We trust we shall be read by hundreds of such this morning. Of some we are certain; and do hereby, agreeably to our ubiquitous privileges, take several breakfasts at once. How pleasant is this rug! How bright and generous the fire! How charming the fair makers of the tea! And how happy that they have not to make it themselves, the drinkers of it! Even the hackney-coachman means to get double as much as usual to-day, either by cheating or being pathetic and the old gentleman is resolved to make amends for the necessity of his morning drive, by another pint of wine at dinner, and crumpets with his tea. It is not by grumbling against the elements that evil is to be done away; but by keeping one's-self in good heart with one's fellow-creatures, and remembering that they are all capable of partaking our pleasures. The contemplation of pain, acting upon a splenetic temperament, produces a stirring reformer here and there, who does good rather out of spite against wrong, than sympathy with pleasure, and becomes a sort of disagreeable angel. Far be it from us, in the present state of society, to wish that no such existed! But they will pardon us for laboring in the vocation to which a livelier nature calls us, and drawing a distinction between the dissatisfaction that ends in good, and the mere common-place grumbling that in a thousand instances to one ends in nothing but plaguing everybody as well as the grumbler. In almost all cases, those who are in a state of pain themselves, are in the fairest way for giving it; whereas, pleasure is in its nature social. The very abuses of it (terrible as they sometimes are) cannot do as much harm as the violations of the common sense of good-humor; simply because it is its nature to go with, and not counter to humanity. The only point to take care of is, that as many innocent sources of pleasure are kept open as possible, and affection and imagination brought in to show us what they are, and how surely all may partake of them. We are not likely to forget that a human being is of importance, when we can discern the merits of so

small a thing as a leaf, or a honey-bee, or the beauty of a flake of snow, or the fanciful scenery made by the glowing coals in a fire-place. Professors of sciences may do this. Writers the most enthusiastic in a good cause, may sometimes lose sight of their duties, by reason of the very absorption in their enthusiasm. Imagination itself cannot always be abroad and at home at the same time. But the many are not likely to think too deeply of anything; and the more pleasures that are taught them by dint of an agreeable exercise of their reflection, the more they will learn to reflect on all around them, and to endeavor that their reflections may have a right to be agreeable. Any increase of the sum of our enjoyments almost invariably produces a wish to communicate them. An over-indulged human being is ruined by being taught to think of nobody but himself; but a human being, at once gratified and made to think of others, learns to add to his very pleasures in the act of diminishing them.

sure.

But how, it may be said, are we to enjoy ourselves with reflection, when our very reflection will teach us the quantity of suffering that exists! How are we to be happy with breakfasting and warming our hands, when so many of our fellow-creatures are, at that instant, cold and hungry?—It is no paradox to answer, that the fact of our remembering them gives us a right to forget them :-we mean, that "there is a time for all things," and that having done our duty at other times in sympathizing with pain, we have not only a right, but it becomes our duty, to show the happy privileges of virtue by sympathizing with pleaThe best person in a holiday-making party is bound to have the loveliest face; or if not that, a face too happy even to be lively. Suppose, in order to complete the beauty of it, that the face is a lady's. She is bound, if any uneasy reflection crosses her mind, to say to herself, "To this happiness I have contributed ;-pain I have helped to diminish; I am sincere, and wish well to everybody; and I think everybody would be as good as I am, perhaps better, if society were wise. Now society, I trust, is getting wiser; perhaps will beat all our wisdom a hundred years hence; and meanwhile, I must not show that goodness is of no use, but let it realize all it can, and be as merry as the youngest." So saying, she gives her hand to

a friend for a new dance, and really forgets what she has been thinking of, in the blithe spinning of her blood. A good-hearted woman, in the rosy beauty of her joy, is the loveliest object But everybody knows that.

in Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, has rebuked Thomson for his famous apostrophe in Winter to the " 'gay, licentious proud;" where he says, that amidst their dances and festivities they little think of the misery that is going on in the world because, observes the philosopher, upon this principle there never could be any enjoyment in the world, unless every corner of it were happy; which would be preposterous. We need not say how entirely we agree with the philosopher in the abstract; and certainly the poet would deserve the rebuke, had he addressed himself only to the "gay;" but then his gay are also "licentious," and not only licentious but "proud." Now we confess we would not be too squeamish even about the thoughtlessness of these gentry, for is not their very thoughtlessness their excuse? And are they not brought up in it, just as a boy in St. Giles's is brought up in thievery, or a girl to callousness and prostitution? It is not the thoughtless in high life from whom we are to expect any good, lecture them as we may and observe-Thomson himself does not say how cruel they are; or what a set of rascals to dance and be merry in spite of their better knowledge. He says,

and so they do. And so they will, till the diffusion of thought, among all classes, flows, of necessity, into their gay rooms and startled elevations; and forces them to look out upon the world, that they may not be lost by being under the level.

We had intended a very merry paper this week, to bespeak the favor of our new readers :

"A very merry, dancing, drinking,

Laughing, quaffing, and unthinking" paper,

as Dryden has it. But the Christmas holidays are past; and it