To attend to a farther perusal of the manuscript was impossible. The old lady desired that her carriage should come round directly; the authoress locked up her composition, that had been so ill received; and the young lady, who had been proud of the acquaintance of each, became an object of suspicion and dislike both to the one and the other; since the former considered her to be of a cruel and unfeeling nature, and the latter could not conceal from herself the mortifying truth, that her play must be wholly devoid of interest, as it had utterly failed either to rivet or to attract her young auditor's attention.

But, though this girl lost two valued acquaintances by acting a lie (a harmless white lie, as it is called,) I fear she was not taught or amended by the circumstance; but deplored her want of luck, rather than her want of integrity; and, had her deception met with the success which she expected, she would probably have boasted of her ingenious artifice to her acquaintance;-nor can I help believing that she goes on in the same way whenever she is tempted to do so, and values herself on the lies of SELFISH FEAR, which she dignifies by the name of LIES OF BENEV

OLENCE.

It is curious to observe that the kindness which prompts to really erroneous conduct cannot continue to bear even a remote connexion with real benevolence. The mistaken girl, in the anecdote related above, begins with what she calls, a virtuous deception. She could not wound the feelings of the authoress by owning that she laughed at her mode of reading: she therefore accused herself of a much worse fault; that of laughing at the personal infirmities of a fellow-creature; and then, finding that her artifice enabled her to indulge her sense of the ridiculous with impunity, she at length laughs treacherously and systematically, because she dares do so, and not involuntarily, as she did at first, at her unsuspecting friend.

Thus such hollow unprincipled benevolence as hers soon degenerated into absolute malevolence. But, had this girl been a girl of principle and of real benevolence, she might have healed her friend's vanity at the same time that she wounded it, by saying, after she had owned that her mode of reading made her laugh, that she was now convinced of the truth of what she had often heard; namely, that authors rarely do justice to their own works,

when they read them aloud themselves, however well they may read the works of others; because they are naturally so nervous on the occasion, that they are laughably violent, because painfully agitated.

This reply could not have offended her friend greatly if at all; and it might have led her to moderate her absurd manner of reading. She would in consequence have appeared to better advantage; and the interests of real benevolence, namely, the doing good to a fellow-creature, would have been served, and she would not, by a vain attempt, to save a friend's vanity from being hurt, have been the means of wounding the feelings of an afflicted woman; have incurred the charge of inhumanity, which she by no means deserved; and have vainly, as well as grossly, sacrificed the interests of truth.

LESSON XXXIX.

Filial and Fraternal Duties.-DR. BROWN.

EVERY human being has been the subject of many cares before he could acquire even the thoughtless vigour of boyhood; and how many cares additional were necessary then, to render that thoughtless vigour something more than mere power of doing injury to itself! They whose constant attendance was necessary to preserve our very being, to whom we owe the instruction we received, and, in a great measure too, our very virtuesmay have sometimes, perhaps, exercised a rigour that was unnecessary, or abstained from affording us comforts which we might have enjoyed without any loss of virtue.

But still the amount of advantage is not to be forgotten on account of some slight evil. We owe them much, though we might have owed them more; and, owing them much, we cannot morally abstain from paying them the duties of those who owe much. They should have no wants while we have even the humblest superfluity; or rather, while want is opposed to want, ours is not that of which we should be the first to think.

In their bodily infirmities, we are the attendants who should be most assiduous round their couch or their chair;

and even those mental infirmities of age which are more disgusting; the occasional peevishness, which reproaches for failures of duty that were not intended; the caprice that exacts one day what it would not permit the day before, and what it is again to refuse on the succeeding day, we are to bear, not as if it were an effort to bear them, and a sacrifice to duty, but with that tenderness of affection which bears much, because it loves much, and does not feel the sacrifices which it occasionally makes, because it feels only the love which delights in making them.

How delightful is the spectacle, when, amid all the temptations of youth and beauty, we witness some gentle heart that gives to the couch of the feeble, and, perhaps, of the thankless and repining, those hours which others find too short for the successive gaieties with which an evening can be filled; and that prefers to the smile of universal admiration, the single smile of enjoyment, which, after many vain efforts, has at last been kindled on one solitary cheek!

If filial love be thus ready to bear with bodily and moral infirmities, it is not less ready to bear with intellectual weakness. There is often, especially in the middle classes of life, as great a difference of mental culture in the parent and child, as if they had lived at the distance of many centuries. The wealth that has been acquired by patient industry, or some fortunate adventure, may be employed in diffusing all the refinements of science and literature to the children of those, to whom the very words, science and literature, are words of which they would scarcely be able, even with the help of a dictionary, to tell the meaning.

In a rank of life still lower, there are not wanting many meritorious individuals, who, uninstructed themselves, labour indefatigably to obtain the means of liberal education for one, whose wisdom, in after years, when he is to astonish the village, may gratify at once their ambition and love.

It would, indeed, be painful to think that any one, whose superiority of knowledge has cost his parents so much fatigue, and so many privations of comfort, which, but for the expense of the means of his acquired superiority, they might have enjoyed, should turn against them,

in his own mind, the acquirements which were to them of so costly a purchase, despising them for the very ignorance which gave greater merit to their sacrifice, and proud of a wisdom far less noble, when it can thus feel contempt, than the humble ignorance which it despises.

Next in order to the relationship of parent and child, may be considered the relation which the child bears to those who are united with him, by the same tie, to the same parental bosoms. If friendship be delightful; if it be above all delightful to enjoy the continued friendship of those who are endeared to us by the intimacy of many years, who can discourse with us of the frolics of the school, of the adventures and studies of the college, of the years when we first ranked ourselves with men in the free society of the world; how delightful must be the friendship of those who, accompanying us through all this long period, with a closer union than any casual friend, can go still farther back, from the school to the very nursery which witnessed our common pastimes: who have had an interest in every event that has related to us, and in every person that has excited our love or our hatred; who have honoured with us those to whom we have paid every filial honour in life, and wept with us over those whose death has been to us the most lasting sorrow of our heart!

Such, in its wide, unbroken sympathy, is the friendship of brothers, considered even as friendship only; and how many circumstances of additional interest does this union receive from the common relationship to those who have original claims to our still higher regard, and to whom we owe an acceptable service, in extending our affection to those whom they love. Every dissension of man with man, excites in us a feeling of painful incongruity. But we feel a peculiar incongruity in the discord of those, whom one roof has continued to shelter during life, and whose dust is afterwards to be mingled under a single stone.

LESSON XL.

The Voyage of Life.-DR. JOHNSON.

'LIFE,' says Seneca, is a voyage, in the progress of which we are perpetually changing our scenes; we first leave childhood behind us, then youth, then the years of ripened manhood, then the better and more pleasing part of old age.' The perusal of this passage having excited in me a train of reflections on the state of man, the incessant fluctuation of his wishes, the gradual change of his disposition to all external objects, and the thoughtlessness with which he floats along the stream of time, I sunk into a slumber amidst my meditations, and on a sudden, found my ears filled with the tumult of labour, the shouts of alacrity, the shrieks of alarm, the whistle of winds, and the dash of waters.

My astonishment for a time repressed my curiosity; but soon recovering myself so far as to inquire whither we were going, and what was the cause of such clamour and confusion, I was told that we were launching out into the ocean of life, that we had already passed the straits of infancy, in which multitudes had perished, some by the weakness and fragility of their vessels, and more by the folly, perverseness, or negligence of those who undertook to steer them; and that we were now on the main sea, abandoned to the winds and billows, without any other means of security than the care of the pilot, whom it was always in our power to choose among great numbers that offered their direction and assistance.

I then looked round with anxious eagerness, and first turning my eyes behind me, saw a stream flowing through flowery islands, which every one that sailed along seemed to behold with pleasure, but no sooner touched, than the current, which, though not noisy or turbulent, was yet irresistible, bore him away. Beyond these islands, all was darkness, nor could any of the passengers describe the shore at which he first embarked.

Before me, and on each side, was an expanse of waters violently agitated, and covered with so thick a mist, that the most perspicacious eye could see but a little way. It appeared to be full of rocks and whirlpools; for many