ostentation influences those who abstain from them; they seem to me, for the most part, equally luxurious in their mode of living, equally jealous of competition and precedence in worldly affairs, as their less strait-laced neighbours.

The luxury of English life has attained a height which it is impossible to contemplate without fear and trembling. It were needless to trace its source and progress; both are equally obvious: commercial success vying with aristocratic magnificence. It is enough that it exists; and I repeat, that it cannot be viewed without fear and trembling. History records that excessive luxury in the manners and habits of a nation has generally been the prelude to its decadence. May God avert such consequences from us! But we ought not to fold our arms in listless supineness, and trust to Providence for our salvation. The evil may yet be arrested, and loftier aspirations, and purer desires yet actuate us.

In the first place, it may be worth while to enquire what we have gained by substituting this excessive luxury for the simpler usages and manners of our forefathers. Are we happier? more contented in spirit? Certainly not; for luxury has been truly termed "Artificial poverty." The disparities created by luxury, are, moreover, frightful. Whatever widens the distance between the rich and the poor, is fraught with calamity to both. The ostentatious abundance of the rich, insults the starving misery of the poor; and if it do not exas

perate them, and fill them with feelings of rancorous hatred and envy towards those who, rioting in the superfluities of life, can look on their destitution with closed hearts and hands; all I can say is, that they display more Christian charity than their self-styled superiors.

The disparities of condition are, I apprehend, greater and more prominent in this country, than in any other civilized country of Europe. At

least, if they are not actually greater in degree, there are certain reasons pertaining to our social system, which occasion them to be felt as more galling.

An intelligent Frenchman, M. Buret, who has lately published a work, entitled, "De la Misère des Classes Laborieuses," thus draws the parallel between his own country and ours: "The parallel between England and France, in relation to the condition to which the greater part of their respective population is reduced, may be drawn in two words, France is poor, England is miserable. This might easily be proved from the principles I have laid down. Since misery is poverty felt, by its contrast with wealth; since riches are necessary to set the phenomenon of misery in evidence; it is among the English nation that it must be most intensely felt, where the opulence of the few affords the most striking contrast to the poverty of the many."

Misery is defined, and I believe correctly, by M. Buret, "the moral perception of poverty."

We are poor or rich, miserable or happy, by comparison. "The poverty of a savage," he observes, "does not produce either suffering or humiliation, because he has not before his eyes a happier state with which to compare it; but the privations of the civilized man lead to misery, because he contrasts them with what all around possess, perhaps with what he formerly possessed himself." Thus misery is a phenomenon of civilization, and it is most felt where civilization is most advanced, and indubitably where the luxuries of life, as in England, are the most ostentatiously paraded.

That the misery thus engendered leads to covetousness, and covetousness to crime, is equally indisputable; and that crimes against property abound more in England than on the continent, is a fact which the evidence of numerous travellers has established. Do we not then, by our ostentatious profusion, "put a stumbling block in our brother's way, and thereby cause him to fall?” Jesus said, "Woe unto the world, because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh."

It were impossible to view this subject candidly and impartially, without feeling strongly that the abettors and fosterers of luxury have much to answer for. The extent of the disparities between rich and poor in this country are little thought of by the majority, thus making good the old saying, "that one half the world knows not how the other

half lives;" and this ignorance is unfortunate for both.

What a contrast between the cottage of the poor man and we will not say palace of the prince or nobleman, but-the dwelling-house, either in town or country, of an opulent English family? The cottage with its bare white-washed walls, its one or two small windows, its brick or paved floor, its scanty furniture-a few crazy chairs and a rickety table. Its beds stowed either in a loft open to the tiled or thatched roof, or else jammed into some dark, ill-ventilated slip of a room adjoining that in which the family live. And such beds! so hard, so comfortless-with their coarse sheets, and thin, tattered blankets! A single night were sufficient to make the bones ache for a week of a child of luxury, were he compelled to lie upon such an one. And then the hard fare, sometimes scanty, always uncertain, because earned with the sweat of the brow, from hand to mouth. The pinching cold of winter, too, a serious evil superadded to others in those counties where fuel is scarce and dear. Such is the abode of a large class of English labourers; and, poverty-stricken as it is, there is misery tenfold deeper.

In the mansion of the rich man, what elegance! what superfluity of comfort! what countless contrivances both for sensual and intellectual indulgence! what taste! what splendour! Art, and the magic of wealth seem to have done their utmost -there is nothing left to desire. And then the

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daily fare of the fortunate individuals inhabiting it: viands of the daintiest kind-choice wines and liqueurs, tempting exotic fruits-all in superabundance! Well might the poor little Sunday-school girl, when asked what was her idea of heaven, answer, in the simplicity of her ignorance, that she supposed it was as fine a place as Squire's parlour, whose magnificence had once been accidentally unfolded to her wondering eyes.

Hard as is the lot, and humble the home of the English cottager in many of the rural districts, there is, I repeat, misery deeper still. It is in our great cities that poverty assumes its most abject, most repulsive form. The country, be the place of man's abiding in it never so humble, is still the country, affording the inestimable blessing of fresh air and light and the cheering spectacle of nature. But in cities-such cities as London-vast, all but interminable, there it is, in dark unwholesome courts and alleys, that the comfortless nook in which the poor man hides his poverty, seems most comfortless.

The world of fashion, congregated in its aristocratic neighbourhood, knows little or nothing of the worlds of misery and squalor huddled together in quarters that seem peculiarly appointed to them. When the fastidious and luxurious great sit down to tables, heaped with "every delicacy of the season," do they bestow one thought upon the hapless wretches, their fellow-citizens and fellow-Christians, who are compelled by poverty to pick from