stant I was supported in my remark by a very consequential voice from the top of the table, which pronounced that salmon was in all its glory.

These are affronts passed upon Nature's prime, which I cannot with any patience endure; and as the Spring is always personified, in my fancy, under the form of a beautiful female, breathing perfumes, and adorned with garlands, I feel all that gallantry and zeal in her behalf, which it is natural to be inspired with in the cause of the sex. Accordingly I am sure to be filled with indignation, when I see her the object of gross and indelicate regards, and viewed only as the source of sensual gratifications. I am impatient to go where I shall behold her treated with her due honours, and where she speaks not to sense and appetite, but to the understanding and to the heart.

In the mean time I cannot help regretting that our English gentry, by the present modes of living, are cut off from all connection with the country at this delightful time, and really see little more of it than what languishes in their flower-pots, or travels on the backs of chimney-sweepers. Any thing attracts more than rural objects and rural contemplations : and the barren sea receives them as soon as the town is too hot to hold them, or pronounced so by the laws of fashionable feeling. I tremble for the fate of the English garden, that pride of our nation, in such inauspicious times, unless, while their owners are salting themselves at Weymouth and Brighthelmstone, they could put their country-seats in a pickle that could preserve them. The sea could never with more propriety be said to be gaining upon the land, than at the present moment; nor does she in this instance restore what she takes, with the same punctuality with which she is said on the coast to make

good in one place, what she has wrested from us in another; indeed it would not be easy to make us compensation for these robberies which she commits in the very heart of our country. That she pillages our forests, I can see with patience; she is even welcome now and then to a morsel of barren land on the coast; but I never can bear that she should rob our gardens of their due care and cultivation, till I am satisfied that in this particular also she makes us a complete public reparation.

I shall finish this day's entertainment with a translation of some remarks which I find in Baron Von Lowhen's Analysis of Nobility, and which I think assist the objects of this paper. It will not be disparaging the nobility, to recommend agriculture to them in all its branches. The English philosopher, whose thoughts on education I have quoted, among other objects of a young person's study, lays considerable stress on the advantage of learning some manual trade; which also made a part of the plan of Charles the Great in the education of his children. The benefits flowing from agriculture are so great, that an attention to this art will supply the want of more splendid talents to the community. There is certainly no part of natural philosophy of equal importance with agriculture: and a nobleman merits as much the esteem of his country for benefiting it through this channel, as through that of war or negotiation: the use of such talents results from the de pravity of mankind; but both the origin and objects. of agriculture are innocent and virtuous. The perfection of a nobleman's character consists in the union of these qualities; so that, while by his civil and military talents he is promoting the honour, by his agricultural skill he may be improving the estate. of his family. Among the Romans, Cato the Censor

wrote treatises upon agriculture, and the Emperor Dioclesian resigned for it the charms of sovereignty. Cyrus the Great made it a mark of his particular favour to admit a subject into his little orchard which he had cultivated with his own hands. We read in the historical relations of China, that there is a public ceremony of opening the grounds, at which the emperor and other Indian monarchs assist every year; and the kings of the ancient Persians mixed with the husbandmen at an annual feast. We are also told, that every year the farmer who has turned his lands to the best account, is made by the emperor of China a mandarin of the eighth order. The heroic prince of Condé frequently made agriculture the amusement of his leisure; and I myself, when in England, saw the earl of Peterborough, who had commanded the British forces, stripped to his waistcoat, with his spade in his hand, and hard at work with his gardeners."-

N° 57. SATURDAY, JUNE 15.

Semper ego auditor tantum nunquamne reponam?
Still must I hear, and never answer make?

SERMON TO A CLERICAL CONGREGATION.

"How was he honoured in the midst of the people, on his coming out of the sanctuary!

"When he put on the robe of honour, and was clothed with the perfection of glory, when he went up to the altar, he made the garment of holiness honourable."

Eccl. ch. 50,

Ir is now a long time that the privilege has been yours, of counselling, correcting, exhorting, admonishing, and reproving myself and the rest of my countrymen, without danger of interruption or reply; and, upon the whole, I have no great fault to find with your doctrines, which, in the main, have been salutary and well-intended. But it is the great mischief attendant upon the office you have undertaken, that, while a man is employed in exposing the errors and reprehending the vices of his fellow-creatures, he is apt to make a tacit reserve in his own favour, and, in the ardour of his preceptive zeal, to forget the necessity of practice, and the power of example. The corruption of the clergy in earlier times, was the effect of this self-partiality. Their eagerness to make converts, swallowed up this attention to their own conduct; and if their consciences became imDortunate and troublesome, the sophistry of the pas

sions was always at hand, to suggest that their private vices were only the result of their public zeal; that, in our present state of imperfection, a great and unlimited scope of exertion must necessarily multiply particular failures, and that these particular failures drew a kind of honour to themselves, from the alliance they claimed with an universal activity and unbounded zeal in the great cause of religion.

This argument, if true of one man, must be true of another; pursue it whither it leads, and we shall find it will operate its own overthrow, and prove nothing by proving too much. Let every man adopt it, and let every man neglect himself in the pursuit of a general good; where will be the advantage of lessons and instructions, and what kind of general good will that be, which fastens upon no individual ? Such palliatives of private and particular vices, are absurd and dangerous in the extreme; since the end of our creation, the interests of humanity, and the law of nature, require that a man's self should be his first care, and that his own practice should be the measure of his worth.

If there were men, however, formerly, who could satisfy themselves with these hollow excuses, even these have now lost every shadow of foundation. The age of church-errantry is over-missionaries, legates, crusaders, and reformers, have long gone off the stage; and the range of our parochial clergy is sufficiently confined, to give them the needful time for attention to their own conduct, and the discharge of their personal duties. On the contrary, I conceive that the great leisure they enjoy, comparatively with the generality of professional men, imposes on them a severer obligation, in respect to all the rules of social virtue, as well as the principles and practices of religion and morality: whereas, amidst the nu