victories which, at the bidding of principle, or by the power of self-command, may have been achieved over the propensities of animal nature. There is an elate independence of soul, in the consciousness of having nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of. In a word, by the constitution of our nature, each virtue has its appropriate charm; and virtue, on the whole, is a fund of varied as well as of perpetual enjoyment, to him who hath imbibed its spirit and is under the guidance of its principles. He feels all to be health and harmony within, and without he seems as if to breathe in an atmosphere of beauteous transparency, proving how much the nature of man and the nature of virtue are in unison with each other. It is hunger which urges to the use of food; but it strikingly demonstrates the care and benevolence of God, so to have framed the organ of taste as that there shall be a superadded enjoyment in the use of it. It is conscience which urges to the practice of virtue; but it serves to enhance the proof of a moral purpose, and therefore of a moral character in God, so to have framed our mental economy, that, in addition to the felt obligation of its rightness, virtue should of itself be so regaling to the taste of the inner man. In counterpart to these sweets and satisfactions of virtue, is the essential and inherent bitterness of all that is morally evil. We repeat, that with this particular argument we do not mix up the agonies of remorse. It is the wretchedness of vice in itself, not the wretchedness which we suffer because of its recollected and felt wrongness, that we now speak of. It is not the painfulness of the compunction felt because of our anger, upon which we at this moment insist, but the painfulness of the emotion itself; and the same remark applies to all the malignant desires of the human heart. True, it is inseparable from the very nature of a desire, that there must be some enjoyment or other at the time of its gratification; but in the case of these evil affections, it is not unmixed enjoyment. The most ordinary observer of his own feelings, however incapable of analysis, must be sensible, even at the moment of wreaking in full indulgence of his resentment on the man who has provoked or injured him, that all is not perfect and entire enjoyment within; but that in this, and indeed in every other malignant feeling, there is a sore burden of disquietudean unhappiness tumultuating in the heart, and visibly pictured on the countenance. The ferocious tyrant, who has only to issue forth his mandate, and strike dead at pleasure the victim of his wrath, with any circumstance too of barbaric caprice and cruelty which his fancy in the very waywardness of passion unrestrained and power unbounded might suggest to him—he may be said to have experienced through life a thousand gratifications in the solaced rage and revenge, which, though ever breaking forth on some new subject, he can appease again every day of his life by some new execution. But we mistake it if we think otherwise than that, in spite of these distinct and very numerous, nay, daily gratifications, if he so choose, it is not a life of fierce internal agony notwithstanding. It seems indispensable to the nature of every desire, and to form part indeed of its very idea, that there should be a distinctly felt pleasure, or, at least, a removal at the time of a distinctly felt pain, in the act of its fulfilment-yet, whatever recreation or relief may have thus been rendered, without doing away the misery, often in the whole amount of it the intense misery, inflicted upon man by the evil propensities of his nature. Who can doubt, for example, the unhappiness of the habitual drunkard ?—and that, although the ravenous appetite by which he is driven along a stormy career, meets every day, almost every hour of the day, with the gratification that is suited to it. The same may be equally affirmed of the voluptuary, or of the depredator, or of the extortioner, or of the liar. Each may succeed in the attainment of his specific object; and we cannot possibly disjoin from the conception of success the conception of some sort of pleasure—yet in perfect consistency, we affirm, with a sad and heavy burthen of unpleasantness or unhappiness, on the whole. He is little conversant with our nature who does not know of many a passion belonging to it, that it may be the instrument of many pleasurable, nay, delicious or exquisite sensations, and yet be a wretched passion still the domineering tyrant of a bondsman, who at once knows himself to be degraded, and feels himself to be unhappy. A sense of guilt is one main ingredient of this misery; yet physically, and notwithstanding the pleasure or the relief inseparable at the moment from every indulgence of the passions, there are other sensations of bitterness, which of themselves, and apart from remorse, would cause the suffering to preponderate. ment. There is an important discrimination made by Bishop Butler in his sermons, and by the help of which this phenomenon of apparent contradiction or mystery in our nature may be satisfactorily explained. He distinguishes between the final object of any of our desires, and the pleasure attendant on, or rather inseparable from, its gratification. The object is not the pleasure, though the pleasure be an unfailing and essential accompaniment on the attainment of the object. This is well illustrated by the appetite of hunger, of which it were more proper to say that it seeks for food than that it seeks for the pleasure which there is in eating the food. The food is the object; the pleasure is the accompani We do not here speak of the distinct and secondary pleasure which there is in the taste of food, but of that other pleasure which strictly and properly attaches to the gratification of the appetite of hunger. This is the pleasure, or relief, which accompanies the act of eating; while the ultimate object, the object in which the appetite rests and terminates, is the food itself. The same is true of all our special affections. Each has a proper and peculiar object of its own, and the mere pleasure attendant on the prosecution of the indulgence of the affection, as has been clearly established by Butler, and fully reasserted by Dr Thomas Brown, is not that object. The two are as distinct from each other, as a thing loved is distinct from the pleasure of loving it. Every special inclination has its special and counterpart object. The object of the inclination is one thing; the pleasure of gratifying the inclination is another; and, in most instances, it were more proper to say, that it is for the sake of the object than for the sake of the pleasure that the inclination is gratified. The distinction that we now urge, though felt to be a subtle, is truly a substantial one, and pregnant both with important principle and important application. The discovery and clear statement of it by Butler, may well be regarded as the highest service rendered by any philosopher to moral science; and that, from the light which it casts both on the processes of the human constitution and on the theory of virtue. As one example of the latter service, the principle in question, so plainly and convincingly unfolded by this great Christian philosopher in his sermon on "The Love of our Neighbour,"* strikes, and with most conclusive effect, at the root of the selfish system of morals- -a system which professes that man's sole object, in the practice of all the various moralities, is his own individual advantage. Now, in most cases of a special, and more particularly of a virtuous affection, it can be demonstrated that the object is a something out of himself, and distinct from himself. Take compassion, for one instance out of the many. The object of this affection is the relief of another's misery, and, in the fulfilment of this, does the affection meet with its full solace and gratification, that is, in a something altogether external from himself. It is true that there is an appropriate plea sure in the indulgence of this affection, even as there is in the indulgence of every other; and in the proportion, too, to the strength of the affection will be the greatness of the pleasure. The man who is doubly more compassionate than his fellow will have doubly a greater enjoyment in the relief of misery; yet that, most assuredly, not because he of the two is the more intently set on his own gratification, but because he of the two is the more intently set on an outward accomplishment, the relief of another's wretchedness. The truth is, that, just because more compassionate than his fellow, the more intent is he than the other on the object of this affection, and the less intent is he than the other on himself the subject of this affection. His thoughts and feelings. are more drawn away to the sufferers, and therefore more drawn away from himself. He is the most occupied with the object of this affection, and on that very account the least occupied with the pleasure of its indulgence. And it is precisely the objective * Butler has two sermons on this subject. The sermon to which Dr Chalmers alludes in this passage is the first of these. *** quality of these regards which stamps upon compassion the character of a disinterested affection. He surely is the most compassionate whose thoughts and feelings are most drawn away to the sufferer, and most drawn away from self; or, in other words, most taken up with the direct consideration of him who is the object of this affection, and least taken up with the reflex consideration of the pleasure that he himself has in the indulgence of it. Yet this prevents not the pleasure from being actually felt; and felt, too, in very proportion to the intensity of the compassion; or, in other words, more felt the less it has been thought of at the time, or the less it has been pursued for its own sake. It seems unavoidable in every affection that the more a thing is loved, the greater must be the pleasure of indulging the love of it; yet it is equally unavoidable that the greater in that case will be our aim towards the object of the affection, and the less will be our aim towards the pleasure which accompanies its gratification. And thus, to one who reflects profoundly and carefully on these things, it is no paradox, that he who has had doubly greater enjoyment than another in the exercise of compassion is doubly the more disinterested of the two; that he has had the most pleasure in this affection who has been the least careful to please himself with the indulgence of it; that he whose virtuous desires, as being the strongest, have in their gratification ministered to self the greatest satisfaction, has been the least actuated of all his fellows by the wishes, and stood at the greatest distance from the aims, of selfishness. Alexander Selkirk. STEELE. [IT has often been a matter of controversy whether, in his inimitable "Robinson Crusoe," Defoe had not largely availed himself of facts communicated by Alexander Selkirk. Sir Walter Scott has justly said that the story of Selkirk appears to have furnished Defoe with “little beyond the bare idea of a man living in an uninhabited island." The story was best told by Sir Richard Steele, in his periodical paper, "The Englishman." Of course we do not give this notice as a sufficient specimen of Steele's powers as a writer, |