aid from those who require it. The benevolent, therefore, are magnificent in their bounty, because they are economical even in bounty itself. Their heart is quick to perceive sources of relief where others do not see them; and the whole result of happiness produced by them, seems often to have arisen from a superb munificence which few could command, when it may, perhaps, have proceeded only from humble means, which the possessor of similar means, without similar benevolence, would think scarcely more than necessary for his own strict necessaries. How beautifully, in Pope's well-known description of an individual, whose simple charities have made him as illustrious, as the most costly profusion of charity in other circumstances could have done, is this quick tendency to minister to every little comfort marked, in the provision which he is represented as making, not for gross and obvious miseries only, but for the very ease of the traveller or common passenger.

"But all our praises, why should Lords engross!
Rise, honest muse, and sing the Man of Ross!
Pleas'd Vaga echoes through her winding bounds,
And rapid Severn hoarse applause resounds.
Who hung with woods yon mountain's sultry brow
From the dry rock, who bade the waters flow?-
Not to the skies, in useless columns, tost,
Or in proud falls magnificently lost,-

But clear and artless, pouring through the plain,
Health to the sick, and solace to the swain.
Whose causeway parts the vale with shady rows?
Whose seats the weary traveller repose?
Who taught that heaven-directed spire to rise ?
The Man of Ross-each lisping babe replies.—
Behold the market-place with poor o'erspread!
The Man of Ross divides the weekly bread-
He feeds yon almshouse-neat, but void of state,
Where Age and Want sit smiling at the gate.
Him portion'd maids-apprenticed orphans blest-
The young who labour, and the old who rest.

Is any sick?-The Man of Ross relieves,

Prescribes, attends, the medicine makes and gives.-
Is there a variance ?-enter but his door,

Balked are the courts-and contest is no more."

What is it which makes this picture of benevolence so peculiarly pleasing? It is not the mere quantity of happiness produced, even when taken in connection with the seemingly disproportionate income, the few hundred pounds a-year, which were so nobly devoted to the production of that happiness. It is pleasing, chiefly from the air of beautiful consistency that appears in so wide a variety of good,-the evidence of a genuine tenderness of heart, that was quick, as I have said, to perceive, not the great evils

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, which force themselves upon every eye, but the little comorts also, which might be administered to those, of whom the rich, even when they are disposed to extend to them the indolent succour of their alms, and sometimes, too, the more generous succour of their personal aid, are yet accustomed to think only as sufferers, who are to be kept alive, rather than as human beings, who are to be made happy. We admire, indeed, the active services, with which the Man of Ross distributed the weekly bread, built houses that were to be homes of repose for the aged and the indigent, visited the sick, and settled amicably the controversies of neighbours and friends, who might otherwise have become foes in becoming litigants; but it is when, together with these prominent acts of obvious beneficence, we consider the acts of attention to humbler, though less obvious, wants, that we feel, with lively delight and confidence, the kindness of a heart, which, in its charitable meditations, could think of happiness as well as of misery, and foresee means of happiness, which the benevolent, indeed, can easily produce, but which are visible only to the benevolent. It is by its inattention to the little wants of man that ostentation distinguishes itself from charity; and a sagacious observer needs no other test, in the silent disdain or eager reverence of his heart, to separate the seeming benevolence, which seeks the applauding voices of crowds, from the real benevolence, which seeks only to be the spreader of happiness or consolation. It is impossible for the most ostentatious producer of the widest amount of good, with all his largesses, and with all his hypocrisy, to be consistent in his acts of seeming kindness; because, to be consistent, he must have that real kindness, which sees, what the cold simulator of benevolence is incapable of seeing, and does, therefore, what such a cold dissembler is incapable even of imagining.

LECTURE LXXXVII.

ON THE POSITIVE DUTIES WHICH WE OWE TO CERTAIN INDIVI DUALS ONLY-ARISING FROM AFFINITY, FRIENDSHIP, BENEFITS RECEIVED, CONTRACT.

IN my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I concluded the remarks which I had to offer, on the duties, negative and positive, which we owe to all the individuals of mankind,—on the species of injury from which we are under a moral obligation to abstain, whoever he may be whom it is in our power to injure, and on the good, which we are under a similar obligation to produce, to every one who comes within the sphere of our usefulness.

After the consideration of these general duties, then, I proceed to the class of additional duties, which we owe to certain individuals only, with whom we are connected by peculiar ties.

These may be considered by us under five heads: as the duties which arise from affinity,-from friendship,-from benefits received, from contract,-from citizenship. The duties of this class, as I have said, are additional duties, not duties exclusive of any of the former. We owe to our relations,—to our friends, -to our benefactors,-to those with whom we have entered into engagements of any sort,-to our fellow-citizens, all which we owe to others, who are connected with us only as human beings; but we owe them more; and it is this accession of duty which we have now to consider.

If the only moral offices, of which we had been formed by nature to feel the obligation, were those which connect us alike with every individual of our race,-whose happiness we should, in that case, as now, have felt it to be our duty to augment when it was in our power to augment it, and when there was no opportunity of this accession, at least not to lessen its amount,it might, perhaps, seem to the unreflecting, that a provision as ample would have been made for the happiness of the world, as that which is now so abundantly made for it,-under the reciprocal kindness of a system of relative duties, that vary in force as the peculiar relation is nearer or more remote, but, in all, add to the general feelings of humanity, some new influence of benevolent regard. There have, indeed, even in our own time, been

philosophers, or moral writers that assume the name, who have contended for this equal diffusion of duty, or, at least, for a gradation of duty that varies only with the absolute merits of the individual, independently of all particular relationship to the agent, asserting, in consequence, that every preference to which the private affections lead, is vicious on this very account, as being inconsistent with that exact conformity to the scale of absolute merit, in which alone they conceive virtue to consist. It is right, indeed, on some occasions, according to this system, to do good to a parent or a benefactor,-or rather, it is not absolutely impossible, that a case should occur, in which it may not be guilt to do good to a parent or a benefactor; but it is only in rare cases, that the choice implied in the singling out of such an object, is proper or allowable-in those rare cases, in which it would have been right to prefer to every other individual of mankind, the same individual, though unconnected with us by any tie but our knowledge of his virtues;-and when he, with whom we consider ourselves as peculiarly connected, by the mere accident of our birth, or of kindnesses conferred on us,-is not the individual whom, in other circumstances, it would have been, in like manner, our duty thus to prefer, it does not become more our duty, on account of these accidental circumstances. Far from being virtuous, therefore, in bestowing on him, any limited good which it is in our power to bestow only on one, we are guilty, with no slight degree of delinquency, in the very action, which we may strive to cover with the seemingly honourable name of gratitude or filial duty. These names, indeed, are honourable only in sound or semblance; for, to those who are capable of appreciating them ethically, they are as void of moral meaning, as the words tall or short, fat or thin; which, in like manner, express qualities of human beings, whom it may be right to prefer, or wrong to prefer,-but not the more right, nor the more wrong, to prefer them on account of any of these physical qualities, to those who may be of greater merit, though fatter, or thinner, taller, or shorter.

The errors of this system of one sole universal duty, I have already endeavoured to point out to you, when I explained the importance to happiness, of all the private affections, the great accession to the general good, which is every moment flowing from the indulgence of a regard, that in thinking with a more lively interest of the individual loved, than it would be possible to think of a community, is then, perhaps, the most effective contributer to the happiness of mankind, when the happiness of mankind is most forgotten by it, in the happiness of one or of a few of the number. The human race, as distinguishable from families and individuals, is but a mere abstraction; and expresses truly nothing more than the very individuals, who are thus at

every moment gratifying and gratified. What produces the greatest amount of good to all, in the enjoyment of the private affections, is not that which we can readily suppose the framer of a world, that is blessed by this very production, to have formed every individual to regard as vice; and to regard as virtue only the disregard of that, with which the world would be more happy. We find, accordingly, the universal feelings of mankind accordant with the system of particular duties, that is so largely productive of happiness. In every region of the earth, and in all circumstances of society, the indulgence of the private affections is considered not as allowable merely, but as obligatory,so obligatory on all, that the guilt which would produce everywhere the most general abhorrence, would be, not the forgetfulness of the good of the world,-for, of this, the thousands that live around us, in the continued exercise of many virtues, seldom if ever think,-but the violation of some one of these private duties, the injury done to a friend, a benefactor, parent,-or even without positive injury, the mere neglect of them, in circumstances of want or of suffering of any kind, which our bounty, or exertions of active aid, could relieve.

We are to prefer to the happiness of our parent or benefactor, it is said, the happiness of a stranger, who, without any particu lar relation to us, is a degree or two higher in the scale of absolute merit. But why are we to seek his happiness, and why is it immoral to disregard it? In this system, as in every other system of vice and virtue, there must be some source of the distinctive feelings. It is to our moral emotions, as they rise on the contemplation of certain actions, that the theorist must look; or, if he disregard these, he must allow that vice and virtue are words without a meaning;-and if virtue and vice have their sole origin in these moral emotions, is there an observer of our nature, who can have the boldness to maintain, that, in relation to these feelings,-in which all that is morally obligatory is to be found,-gratitude to a benefactor is a vice, and the disregard of the sufferings of a parent a virtue, whenever, without the power of relieving both, we see before us, at the same time, a suffering stranger, who is capable of doing a little more good to the world? The very feeling of duty, then, has its source, and its only source, in the very moral emotions, by which the private affections are particularly recommended to us. To exclude therefore from a system of duty, the exercise of the private affections, in those preferences which are only the private affections becoming active, and, in excluding these, to maintain at the same time that there is a system of duty, a virtue in certain preferences, a vice in certain other preferences,-is to be guilty of inconsistency, far more illogical, than the licentiousness which denies all virtue and vice whatever. To prove that there is some truth in