gether; to think of what we are not, with the feelings of what we are; to be different and yet the same. Hypochondria may do this; a melancholy imagination, or a strong imagination of any sort, may do it for a time; but it will never be done generally, and nature never intended it should. A decaying dead body is no more the real human being, than a watch, stopped and mutilated, is a time-piece, or cold water warm, or a numb finger in the same state of sensation as the one next it, or any one modification of being the same as another. We may pitch ourselves by imagination into this state of being; but it is ourselves, modified by our present totalities and sensation, that we do pitch there. What we may be otherwise, is another thing. The melancholy imagination may give it melancholy fancies; the livelier one, if it pleases, may suppose it a state of exquisite dissolution. The philosopher sees in it nothing but a contradiction to the life by which we judge of it, and a dissolution of the compounds which held us together. There is one thing alone in such gloomy beggings of a question, which throws them back upon the prescriptions of wisdom, and prevents them from becoming general. They are always accompanied by ill health. We do not mean a breaking up of the frame, or that very road to death, which may be a kindly and cheerful one, illuminated by the sunset, as youth was by the dawn: but a polluted and artificial state of blood, or an insufficient vigor of existence, that state, in short, which is an exception to the general condition of humanity, and acts like the proof of a rule to the intentions of Nature. For these are so kind, that no mistake in the world, not even vice itself, is so sure to confuse a man's sensations and render them melancholy, as ill-health. Nature seems to say to us, Be, above all things, as natural as you can be, as much as possible in the best fashion of the mould in which I cast you, and you shall be happy." Nor is this unlucky for virtue, but most lucky: for it takes away its pride, and leaves it its cheerfulness. Real vice will soon be found to be real unhealthiness: nor could society have a better guide to the reformation of its moral systems, than by making them as compatible as possible with every healthy impulse. But why, it may be asked, are we not all healthy? It is impossible to say: but

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this is certain, that the oftener a man asks himself that question, the more intimations he has that he is to try and get out of the tendency to ask them. We may live elsewhere: we may be compounded over again, and receive a new consciousness here ;—a guess which, if it seems dreary at first, might lead us to make a heaven of the earth we live in, even for our own sakes hereafter. But at all events, put, as Jupiter says in the fable, your shoulder to the wheel; and put it as cheerfully as you can. The way that Andrea de Basso should have set about reforming the Ferrarese beauties, would have been to show them, that their enjoyments were hurtful in proportion as they were extravagant, and less than they might be, in proportion as they were in bad taste. But to ask the healthy to be hypochondriacal: the beautiful to think gratuitously of ugliness; and the giddy, much less the wise, to desire to be angels in heaven, by representing God as a cruel and eternal punisher, is what never could, and never ought to have, a lasting effect on humanity.

It has been well observed, that life is a series of present sensations. It might be added, that the consciousness of the present moment is one of the strongest of those sensations. Still this consciousness is a series, not a line; a variety with intervals, not a continuity and a haunting. If it were, it would be unhealthy; if it were unhealthy, it would be melancholy; if it were melancholy, the evident system upon which nature acts would be dif ferent. Thus it is impossible that men should be finally led by gloomy, and not by pleasant doctrines.

When the Ferrarese ladies read the poem of Andrea de Basso, it occupied the series of their sensations for a little while, more or less according to their thoughtfulness, and more or less, even then, according to their unhealthiness. The power of voluntary thought is proportioned to the state of the health. In a little time, the Ferrarese, being like other multitudes, and even gayer, would turn to their usual reflections and enjoyments, as they accordingly did. About that period Ariosto was born. He rose to vindicate the charity and good-will of nature; and put forth more real wisdom, truth, and even piety, in his willing enjoyment of the creation, than all the monks in Ferrara could have mustered together for centuries.

To conclude, Andrea de Basso mistook his own self, as well as the means of instructing his callous beauty. There are few things more oppressive to the heart, than the want of feeling in those whose appearance leads others to feeli ntensely-the sight of beauty sacrificing its own real comfort as well as ours, by a heartless and indiscriminate love of admiration from young and old, from the gross and the refined, the wise and the foolish, the good-natured and the ill-natured, the happy-making and the vicious. If Andrea de Basso's heroine was one of this stamp, we can imagine her to have irritated his best feelings, as well as his more equivocal. We hope she was not merely a giddy creature, who had not quite patience enough with her confessor. Alfred the Great, when a youth, was accustomed to turn a deaf ear to the didactics of his holy kinsman St. Neot; for which, says the worthy Bishop Asser, who was nevertheless a great admirer of the king, and wrote his life, all those troubles were afterwards brought upon him and his kingdom. Be this as it may, and supposing the Ferrarese beauty to have been an unfeeling one, the poet was not aware, while triumphing over her folly, and endeavoring to enjoy the thought of her torments, that he was confounding the sentiment of the thing with its reverse, and doing his best to make himself a worse and more hard-hearted person than she. His efforts to induce us to think lightly of the most beautiful things in the external world, by showing us that they will not always be what they are-that a smooth and graceful limb will not for ever be the same smooth and graceful limb, nor an eye an eye, nor an apple an apple, are not as wise as they are poetical. To have said that the limb, unless admired with sentiment as well as with ordinary admiration, is a common-place thing to what it might be, and that there is more beauty in it than the lady supposed, would have been good. To make nothing of it, because she did not make as much as she could, is unwise. But above all, to consign her to eternal punishment in the next world, because she gave rise to a series of fugitive evils in this-granting even that she, and not her wrong education, was the cause of them-is one of those idle worryings of himself and others, which only perplex further

what they cannot explain, and have at last fairly sickened the world into a sense of their unhealthiness.

What then remains of the poetical denouncements of Andrea de Basso? Why the only thing which ought to remain, and which when left to itself retains nothing but its pleasure-their poetry. When Dante and Milton shall cease to have any effect as religious dogmatisers, they will still be the mythological poets of one system of belief, as Homer is of another. So immortal is pleasure, and so surely does it escape out of the throng of its contradictions.

CHAPTER LI.

Thoughts and Guesses on Human Nature.

CONFUSION OF MODES OF BEING.

PEOPLE undertake to settle what ideas they shall have under such and such circumstances of being, when it is nothing but their present state of being that enables them to have those ideas.

VARIETY OF THE COLORS OF PERCEPTION.

There is reason to suppose that our perceptions and sensations are more different than we imagine, even upon the most ordinary things, such as visible objects in general, and the sense of existence. We have enough in common, for common intercourse; but the details are dissimilar, as we may perceive in the variety of palates. All people are agreed upon sweet and sour; but one man prefers sour to sweet, and another this and that variety of sour and sweet. "What then is the use of attempting to make them agree?" Why, we may try to make them agree upon certain general modes of thinking and means of pleasure:-we may color their existence in the gross, though we must leave the particular shades to come out by themselves. We may enrich their stock of ideas, though we cannot control the items of the expenditure.

CANNOT.

The question

"But what if we cannot do even this?" is answered by experience. Whole nations and already been altered in their modes of thinking.

ages have Even if it