licacy of feeling mars that pleasure which thoughtless vivacity would perfectly enjoy.

You gave, in one of your earlier papers, an account of two gentlemen, both fortunate in life, but very differently affected by their good fortune: one who was above the enjoyment of any ordinary good; the other, on whom every attainment conferred happiness, who had no eye for deformity, and no feeling for uneasiness. Allow me to illustrate the same power of a constitutional difference of temper upon the opposite situation, from the example of two persons, whose characters some late incidents gave me a particular opportunity of tracing.

Tom Sanguine and Ned Prospect, like your friends Clitander and Eudocius, were school-fellows. Sanguine was the first boy in the school in point of learning, and very often its leader in every thing. The latter distinction it cost him many a black eye to maintain, as he generally had a battle with every lad who disputed his pre-eminence, or who objected to any project he had laid down for his companions. Sometimes he was thrown entirely out of his command, and would be whole days in a state of proscription from his fellows, attended only by one or two little boys, whom he either awed or bribed to continue of his party.

Prospect had a certain influence too, but it was acquired by different means. He had no pretensions to learning, and almost constantly neglected or failed in the tasks that were set him; yet he was a favourite with his masters, from a certain liveliness which looked like genius, and a certain attention to them which looked like application; and with the boys he was always ready to join any plan which the forward could devise or the bold could execute. He was in friendship with every one, and did not care with whom he was in friendship; of jealousy or rivalship

he was perfectly devoid, and often returned the assistance which Sanguine afforded him at their exercises, by conciliatory endeavours to accommodate differences between him and some of their companions. As for himself, he never remembered quarrels or resented affronts; disappointments of every kind he forgot; indeed, if a school allusion may be allowed, there was scarce a past tense in his ideas; they always looked to the future.

When they rose into manhood and life, the two young gentlemen retained the same characteristic difference as when at school. Sanguine was soon remarked for his abilities, and easily flattered himself that every advancement would be open to them. He looked to the goal in business or ambition, without troubling himself to examine the ground between. Full of that pride and self-importance to which he thought his talents entitled him, he would not degrade them by an application to the ordinary means by which inferior men attain success. He would

not stoop to solicit what he thought his merit gave him a right to expect: to conciliate the great, he called servility; to be obliged to his equals, he termed dependence. In argument, he was warm and dogmatical; in opposition, haughty and contemptuous; he was proud to shew the fallacy of reputed wisdom, and sought for opportunities of treating folly with disdain. His inferiors he loved to awe into silence; and in company with those above him, he often retired into a proud indignant silence himself. To be easily pleased or amused, he thought the mark of a light and frivolous mind; and, as few people cared to be at the expence, he seldom received either pleasure or amusement. When he might have bestowed these on others, he often did not think it worth his while to bestow them. For his learning, his knowledge, or his wit, he demanded

such an audience as he rarely could find; and among men of middling capacity, of whom the bulk of society is formed, one half of Sanguine's acquaintance dreaded his talents, and the other half denied them. In his friendships he was warm and violent; but they were generally connections in which he was rather to give than to find support, rather to confer than to receive obligation.

With such a cast of mind and disposition, Sanguine, notwithstanding all his natural and all his acquired abilities, has succeeded very ill in life. Of those (and they were but few) by whom he was neither hated nor feared, scarce any one was interested to promote his success. There is always so much of selfishness in our exertions for others, as to claim a sort of property in the good we do them; and him who, like Sanguine, does not allow that claim, we seldom wish to oblige a second time. Nor were his genius and knowledge, great as they were allowed to be, better suited to the ordinary affairs of the world than those of a much lower order. He often despised that mediocrity which was a fitter instrument for his purpose than all his boasted excellence. He laboured to shine where he should have been contented to convince; to astonish and to dazzle where it ought to have been his object to persuade and to win.

The neglects of the world Sanguine resented more than he endeavoured to overcome; and having long lost all hopes of success in it, now employs the powers of his fancy and of his eloquence, to degrade those dignities which he has failed to reach, and to depreciate those advantages he has been unable to attain. He saunters about in places of public resort, like the evil genius of the time, sickening at every prosperous, and enjoying every untoward event; suffering with

out compassion, and unfortunate without the dignity which a good mind allows to misfortune.

Prospect, whose abilities did not promise much eminence in any of the learned professions, was bred a merchant. His master found him not very attentive to his business; but exceedingly serviceable to him and his family in every thing else. He frequently forgot to make the proper entries in the books; but of the little commissions of his master's wife and children he took particular care; and once excused himself for a mistake with regard to a valuable cargo from the West-Indies, by shewing how much he had been occupied about a parroquet and a monkey for the young ladies. To himself he made a sort of apology for these neglects, from an idea, that in trade nothing was worth attending to but in the capital; and talked with great fluency, and an appearance of information, on the plans he had formed for entering upon a large scale of commerce in London. To London accordingly he went; but found there, that he was still distant from the immediate scene of the trade he had chiefly studied: and, after spending, in amusement rather than in dissipation, half the stock from which he was to have raised a princely fortune, he procured recommendations to a house in Jamaica, and embarked for that island with the full resolution of being as rich as Alderman Beckford before he returned. He failed of being as rich, but he was fully as happy; and in the course of that happiness spent all the remainder of his patrimony. He afterwards visited several of the American provinces, without any increase of fortune or decrease of good-humour; and at last returned home with no money in his purse, and but little information in his mind, but with that flow of animal spirits which no ill success could overcome, and that sort of buzzing idea of future good fortune, which

no experience of disappointment has ever been able to drive out of his head.

By the favour of a person of considerable interest, whom his officious civility had in some instance happened to oblige, he has obtained a small pension, on which he makes shift to live, and to get into very tolerable company, being admitted as a good-natured oddity, who never offends, and is never offended. He has now given up his plans for bettering his private fortune, except in so far as they are connected with the prosperity of his country, having turned his thoughts entirely to politics and to finance. I know not if it was an ill-natured amusement which I received the other morning from seeing him attack his old acquaintance Sanguine in the coffee-house, and drive him from the fire-place to the window, from the window to the door, and from the door out into the street, with a paper of observations on Mr. Pitt's plan for reducing the national debt. Sanguine was dumb with vexation and contempt, which Prospect (who was full of bustle and of enjoyment from this new-sprung scheme) very innocently construed into the silence of attention, and concluded his pursuit, by thrusting the paper into the other's hand, telling him, that when next they met he should be glad to have his sentiments on the probability of the plan, and the justness of the calculations.

It would, I believe, Sir, considerably increase the stock of human happiness, if you could persuade men like Mr. Sanguine, that misanthropy, comfortless as it is, is yet more an indulgence than a virtue; that a war with the world is generally founded on injustice; and that neither the yieldings of complacency, nor the sportfulness of good-humour, are inconsistent with the dignity of wisdom. I am, &c. MODERATUS.

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