ON THE MISERIES OF MAN'S LIFE.

How few men in the world are prosperous! What an infinite number of slaves and beggars, of persecuted and oppressed people, fill all corners of the earth with groans, and heaven itself with weeping, prayers, and sad remembrances! How many provinces and kingdoms are afflicted by a violent war, or made desolate by popular diseases! Some whole countries are remarked with fatal evils, or periodical sicknesses. Grand Cairo in Egypt feels the plague every three years returning like a quartan ague, and destroying many thousand of persons. All the inhabitants of Arabia the desart are in continual fear of being buried in huge heaps of sand, and therefore dwell in tents and ambulatory houses, or retire to unfruitful mountains, to prolong an uneasy and wilder life. And all the countries round about the Adriatic sea feel such violent convulsions, by tempests and intolerable earthquakes, that sometimes whole cities find a tomb, and every man sinks with his own house, made ready to become his monument, and his bed is crushed into the disorders of a grave.

It were too sad if I should tell how many persons are afflicted with evil spirits, with spectres and illusions of the night.

He that is no fool, but can consider wisely, if he be in love with this world, we need not despair but that a witty man might reconcile him with tor

tures, and make him think charitably of the rack, and be brought to dwell with vipers and dragons, and entertain his guests with the shrieks of mandrakes, cats, and screech-owls, with the filing of iron and the harshness of rending of silk, or to admire the harmony that is made by a herd of evening wolves, when they miss their draught of blood in their midnight revels. The groans of a man in a fit of the stone are worse than all these; and the distractions of a troubled conscience are worse than those groans; and yet a merry careless sinner is worse than all that. But if we could, from one of the battlements of heaven, espy how many men and women at this time lie fainting and dying for want of bread; how many young men are hewn down by the sword of war; how many poor orphans are now weeping over the graves of their father, by whose life they were enabled to eat; if we could but hear how mariners and passengers are at this present in a storm, and shriek out because their keel dashes against a rock or bulges under them; how many people there are that weep with want, and are mad with oppression, or are desperate by too quick a sense of a constant infelicity; in all reason we should be glad to be out of the noise and participation of so many evils. This is a place of sorrows and tears, of so great evils and a constant calamity: let us remove from hence, at least, in affections and preparation of mind.*

From the place of my birth I shall only desire to remem

ON IDLE CURIOSITY.

COMMONLY Curious persons, or (as the apostle's phrase is is) busy-bodies, are not solicitous or

ber the goodness of the Lord who hath caused my lot to fall in a good ground; who hath fed me in a pleasant pasture, where the well springs of life flow to all that desire to drink them. And this is no small favour if I consider how many poor people perish among the heathen, where they never hear the name of Christ; how many poor christians spring up in countries enslaved by Turkish and Anti-christian tyrants, whose souls and bodies languish under miserable slavery. None knows what mercy 'tis to live under a good and wholesome law, that have not considered the sad condition of being subject to the will of an unlimited man.

Nor is the place only but the time of my coming into the world a considerable mercy to me. It was not in the midnight of popery, nor in the dawn of the gospel restored day, when light and shades were blended and almost undistinguished, but when the sun of truth was exalted in his progress and hastening towards a meridian glory.

The next blessing I have to consider in my nativity is my parents, both of them pious and virtuous in their own conversation, and careful instructors of my youth, not only by precept, but example, &c.-Hutchinson's Memoirs.

Such are Mrs. Hutchinson's effusions of gratitude. The same sentiment is expressed by Gibbon, who says, "My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the bounty of nature, which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune."

Gibbon's Memoirs.

Coleridge in the introduction to his Lay Sermons, page x. says, "Few are sufficiently aware how much reason most of us have, even as common moral livers, to thank God for being

inquisitive into the beauty and order of a well governed family, or after the virtues of an ex

Englishmen. It would furnish grounds both for humility towards Providence and for increased attachment to our country, if each individual could but see and feel, how large a part of his innocence he owes to his birth, breeding, and residence in Great Britain. The administration of the laws; the almost continued preaching of moral prudence; the number and respectability of our sects; the pressure of our ranks on each other, with the consequent reserve and watchfulness of demeanour in the superior ranks, and the emulation in the subordinate; the vast depth, expansion, and systematic movements of our trade; and the consequent interdependence, the arterial or nerve-like net-work of property, which make every deviation from outward integrity a calculable loss to the offending individual himself from its mere effects, as obstruction and irregularity; and lastly, the naturalness of doing as others do; these and the like influences, peculiar, some in the kind and all in the degree, to this privileged island, are the buttresses, on which our foundationless well-doing is upheld even as a house of cards, the architecture of our infancy, in which each is supported by all.

TO BRITAIN.

I love thee, O my native Isle !
Dear as my mother's earliest smile,
Sweet as my father's voice to me,
Is all I hear, and all I see;

When glancing o'er thy beauteous land,
In view thy Public Virtues stand,
The guardian-angels of thy coast,
To watch the dear domestic Host,
The Heart's affections, pleased to roam
Around the quiet heaven of Home.

I love Thee,-when I mark thy soil
Flourish beneath the Peasant's toil,
And from its lap of verdure throw
Treasures which neither Indies know.

cellent person but if there be any thing for which men keep locks and bars and porters,

I love Thee, when I hear around

Thy looms, and wheels, and anvils sound,
Thine Engines heaving all their force,
Thy waters labouring on their course,
And Arts, and Industry, and Wealth,
Exulting in the joys of Health.

I love Thee,-when I trace thy tale
To the dim point where records fail;
Thy deeds of old renown inspire
My bosom with our father's fire;
A proud inheritance I claim

In all their sufferings, all their fame:
Nor less delighted when I stray

Down History's lengthening, widening way,
And hail thee in thy present hour,
From the meridian arch of power,
Shedding the lustre of thy reign,
Like sunshine over land and main.

I love Thee,-when I read the lays
Of British Bards in elder days,
Till rapt on visionary wings,
High o'er thy cliffs my Spirit sings;
For I, amidst thy living choir,
I too, can touch the sacred lyre.

I love Thee,-when I contemplate
The full-orb'd grandeur of thy state :
Thy laws and liberties, that rise,
Man's noblest works beneath the skies,
To which the Pyramids are tame,
And Grecian Temples bow their fame;
These, thine immortal sages wrought
Out of the deepest mines of thought;
These, on the scaffold, in the field,
Thy Warriors won, thy Patriots seal'd
These, at the parricidal pyre,
Thy Martyrs sanctified in fire.

K