plans were the best possible, and conducted in the most judicious manner, he attributes their discomfiture solely to casualties which nobody could have foreseen. "If it had not been that that fellow who bought my last consignment from was a villain, I should at this moment have been in possession of a fortune of L.30,000," says the disappointed speculator; and he speaks truly: but he overlooks the circumstance that he sold his goods so very advantageously, that it would have been apparent to any one, not blinded by an over-eagerness of gain, that the purchaser had little intention of paying the price. A person with better regulated notions would aim rather to dispose of a great number of commodities, at moderate returns, than of a few at a large profit ; but for this sure and liberal system of dealing, the daring commercial adventurer entertains a sovereign contempt; a small advantage he does not think worth accepting, and accordingly his transactions are all of a hazardous kind, either issuing in a dead loss or in enor mous gains. By this hap-hazard species of traffic, an immense fortune is occasionally accumulated, and may be considered in the light of a windfall to its owner, as much as if it had presented itself in the shape of an unexpected legacy. It comes upon him as unprepared to use it in moderation, and is for the most part as injudiciously squandered. Indeed, in whatever way it comes, the result is nearly the same.

"What an unfortunate wretch I am," exclaims he who finds himself the holder of an unsuccessful lottery-ticket, "to pitch upon No. 999, when, if I had taken the one above it, I should have got the L.20,000 prize!" Now, mark the bad logic of the man: he calls himself unfortunate in not selecting No. 1000, as if he were certain it would have turned out a prize if he had held it. But so willing is he to interpret chances in his own favour, that a doubt on this exceedingly problematical point never enters his head; and he considers himself to have been so very close upon gaining a large sum, that he is sure of it the next time he

makes the trial. Well, perhaps he does succeed the next time, or the next, or the time after; and how does this vast influx of wealth find and affect him?-it finds him very much in need of it, and very eager to wallow in it; and ten to one, he is soon in a worse condition than ever. This suddenly acquired wealth does not seem to have the same blessing with it that generally accompanies the gains of patient industry, or of an honest ingenuity, exerted from day to day. Sudden wealth may be compared to a tornado, which produces nothing but havoc and desolation; the slow earnings of industry to the silent dews, by whose influence the face of nature is beautified, and vegetation invigorated and refreshed.

The above arguments bear with full force upon the life of the gambler, who is simply a person given up to delusive hopes of acquiring wealth without working for it. In general, we find moral writers and dramatists, in their endeavours to check this vice, go no farther than to show the horrible results which are apt to spring from its indulgence. It might be advantageous also to explain the rational principles upon which gambling is a worse means of endeavouring to obtain money than an industrious course of life. To assume a language which will be intelligible to those who are addicted to it, it is attended with a worse chance of ending in the desired result. If twenty persons are engaged in one street, each in his own honest business, it is certain that some profit will be made amongst them, so that most of them, at least, will be able to exist without coming upon their capital. But if twenty persons be engaged as industriously in gambling, it is certain that no profit will be made amongst them on the contrary, money will be lost in paying for the rooms, and for the materials of the sport. Supposing the twenty persons were kept by themselves, and that they began with a considerable stock of money amongst them, they would by and bye find themselves reduced to pennilessness, by reason of this constant drain upon their resources. Now, if money cannot be made by any com

munity of gamblers among themselves, what hope is there, except in that vanity and self-love which speaks delusively to every bosom, that an individual will enrich himself? Evidently none whatever. Thus, gambling in every case where it does not suppose a simpleton to be pillaged, is proved a mere fallacy; while, in cases where that is supposed, it is the meanest, because the safest of robberies. In no point of view can there be any advantage in this course of life-for if wealth be lost, it produces all the usual evils of that contingency; if it be gained, it never thrives, and is apt to be again quickly lost, either by play, or by irregular and expensive living. Upon the whole, while some must be greater losers than others, there is no general chance in favour of the gambler, as there is in favour of the honest and industrious man-he is almost certain of being, in the long-run, worse than when he began. He may be compared, indeed, to a merchant who exposes his capital to an almost absolute certainty of being impaired, by assuming a line of speculations in which the chance of loss is invariably and palpably greater than the chance of gain. The only individual who can thrive by this unhappy vice is the person who keeps the gaming-house; the players, as a whole, must be losers.

Of all classes of society, the young are the most apt to give themselves up to a practice of longing for windfalls. The male human being, from six to sixteen, is constantly dreaming of pots of money found in the earth, or of large fortunes made in foreign adventure, after the manner of Whittington with his cat. From sixteen to four-and-twenty he dreams of handsome fortunes made by the simple and rather agreeable process of taking a handsome woman to wife; and he is constantly on the outlook for such a chance of placing himself, as it is called, upon his feet. Others dream of legacies from rich and hitherto unheard-of uncles, who will be dying some of these days in India, fifty years after they had been given up by their relations for lost. All are more or less taken up by the idea of ready-made

fortunes, which are to save them the trouble of making one for themselves; and in this gasping and grasping hope of becoming suddenly enriched, they spend perhaps the time and energies which ought to be directed to better objects. We would warn our young readers against giving themselves up to these vain phantasies. The proportion of those who have been so fortunate, as it is called, as to fall into the possession of windfalls, is so very small as compared with those who do not, that it ought never to be taken into account in our calculations as to the means of providing ourselves with a subsistence. If we would just reflect for a moment upon what the most of us are at our outset in life -bare, unlicked creatures, with merit all to be proved, if it really exists at all, but most probably it does not exist— merely individuals in the great herd of the beardless, none of whom seem any different from the rest—we would never flatter ourselves that there was any chance of fortune singling us out as her own peculiar favourites, or of our gaining any thing whatsoever, till we had somehow asserted our right to it. It is nothing but an overweening self-love, and a blindness to the degree of estimation in which, while as yet untried, we are likely to be held by the rest of mankind, that leads us into this error; and he, for certain, has the best chance of quickly investing himself with the good things of Fortune, who is soonest cured of so fatal and bewildering a delusion.

TOM BRIMS.

Ir appears to be a prevailing impression, in consequence of the strain of our fictitious literature, that there is no pathos any where, except in either very refined society, or among a rural population. No one seems to think that there can ever be any sentiment in the situation of a shopkeeper, or that feeling, any more than friendship, is to be found in

trade This notion, I am persuaded, has arisen solely from the circumstance, that poets and story-writers, finding some difficulty in managing the current of a pathetic tale amidst the commonplace details of business, have invariably looked elsewhere for characters and scenery: it is entirely a matter of literary convenience. Thus, though we see every day the most striking turns of fortune in mercantile life, accompanied by distresses of the most touching kind, such is nevertheless the habit into which our reading has thrown us, that we would be apt to think it very odd if a tragedy, or even the simplest sentimental tale, were attempted to be woven from such a tissue.

Though not insensible to the danger of going right against the stream of popular taste, I am induced to do so on the present occasion, in order to commemorate an individual whose fate made a deep impression upon me in my earlier years, and in whose story, referring though it does to mere trade, I cannot help believing that the public will, like myself, feel somewhat interested. No tale could be simpler in its pathos, or less involved in its parts; and yet I never can think of it without a degree of sympathising sadness, which might now-a-days be refused to the most lordly and the most complicated sorrows of the stage.

Thomas Brims had been reared, I believe, as a traveller for a house in Yorkshire, which dealt largely in leather caps and braces. When I first knew him, he was a handsome middle-aged and middle-sized man, always dressed in the very extreme of the prevailing fashion, yet with an easiness of manner which is not often found in carefully dressed men. It was alleged of Brims that he had been such an exquisite in his earlier years, as to sleep in doe-skin gloves for the purpose of whitening his hands. But this was perhaps a fiction. No man ever took the head of the table in a travellers' room with less exceptionable pretensions to the honour than he. Clever, well-bred, goodhumoured, and an admirable teller of stories, he seemed to possess every qualification for that important post; and it