especially, a close observer might be astonished, if less inured to it, at the little idea of wrong attached to feelings of this description. There are few women, perhaps not one, who, if she knows herself, can say she was never pained by the praises of another, nor ever depreciated the merits of another to enhance her own. If we say this is natural, and cannot be prevented—yes, but it is hateful, it is sinful, it is diabolical. The Gospel has been sent to disclose to us our state of natural delusion, by the shedding on our bosoms of a purer light; and it has ranked these feelings in the catalogue of moral crimes, most offensive to God and man, and deserving of eternal condemnation. We in our great wisdom keep the opinions of our heathen ancestors, and in our great madness act upon them, teach them to our children, and say they cannot be educated without them. Then let them remain for ever ignorant. We strangely miscalculate, even for our happiness in this world, when we sacrifice character to acquirements of any kind. That is indeed to part from our decent and necessary cloathing, for the purchase of some brilliant jewel with which to deck ourselves. I surely shall not be suspected of too lightly estimating the advantage of mental cultivation and polite accomplishments. By every proper motive, by every sinless incentive, we may provoke our pupils to exertion to the gifted we may say, make use by assiduity of what you have to the less endowed, make amends by assiduity for what you have not; and by praise or blame enforce the precept. But if we must choose between the moral and the intellectual good-if the culture that is to raise the flower, must foster with it the poisonous weed, we hold the utmost acquisition of human intellect light indeed. Its future fruits will never allay the passions excited for its acquisition. When sin becomes the burden and the shame of a bosom struggling and yet unable to repress it, learning and talent will not whisper peace. When the applause, and the triumph, and the approbation of men are past and forgotten, the evil thought, the sinful emotion will remain upon the conscience; and unless mercy blot it thence, on Heaven's eternal records. No. XIII. EVIL SPEAKING. .'Tis Slander, Whose edge is sharper than the sword; whose tongue All corners of the world. ONE day-I suppose my readers do not exactly care what day, or what sort of a day, or at what hour, or whether in spring or autumn, in sunshine or in clouds-I tell these particulars sometimes, when I want to fill out my paper; but on this occasion I have enough to say without them. So it was one day I had been walking a considerable distance through lanes where nature, unchecked by any interference on the part of man, brought forth together, in boundless luxuriance, her bitters and her sweets -the poisonous Nightshade twined her branches round the honied Woodbine-the Bind-weed laid its head of pure and spotless white, on the hard bosom of a neighbouring Thorn-the Thistle and the Harebell grew side by side. It was with difficulty, in some places, I had made my way through the midst of them and sometimes the Brambles caught my dress, and sometimes I set my foot upon a Thistle-and when I attempted to gather a flower, the thorns pricked and the nettles stung me. But I do not remember that I felt any surprise, or any sort of resentment that they did so. I neither wondered they should grow there, nor desired that they should be rooted out. I cannot recollect, indeed, that I had any thoughts upon the subjectit was so natural they should be there, and being there, that they should do what they did, all seemed too much of course to claim any observation. Leaving these wild and lawless paths, I entered by a gateway into grounds that, though scarcely extensive enough to claim the title of a park, were yet approaching to it in character, very beautiful and of no inconsiderable extent. Though the house was not in sight, no one could doubt it was the paddock of some goodly mansion, on which the owner expended constant attention, and which it pleased him to adorn and beautify. The magnificent trees, feathered even to the ground, showed the care with which they had been protected from the browzing of the cattle. The flowering shrubs told by their sunny looks that they or their fore fathers had been bred in something less than fiftytwo degrees of latitude. A slender Leveret stole fleetly over the turf, scarcely bending under its steps; and a Squirrel, that looked as if he had been just combed and dressed, was leaping among the trees-but the Cur that should enter there was doomed to death, by notice written large upon a board; and his owner too, unless the spring-guns could distinguish between the honest man and the thief. And now my path was broad and straight, and beaten very hard; having no more to force my road through narrow ways and paths uncertain, I began to walk freely and carelessly; occupied with the altered beauty of the scene around me, I did not look where I was treading. Nature was not displaced by art, for she was here in all her splendour, in the full-dress garb with which taste, and industry, and wealth had clothed her, yet decked in no other beauties than her own. My mind became occupied with admiring, that He who had made a world so beautiful that nothing could be wanting to it, had yet left to its inhabitants the means of improving it, and adding to its charms— for doubtless, even in Eden, it was the business of man to train and beautify what nature made: and now that it has become his harder task to humour the unwilling soil, and provide against a capricious climate, a mass of the most exquisite materials remain to him, and his toil and care are repaid by every combination of beauty taste can |