Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t'other prince-but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. "They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation? Poor creatures! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath-somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards sugar-plum'd) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a royal brat's memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human suffering." "Il y a une espèce de honte d'être heureux à la vue de certaines misères," writes La Bruyère again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those "whining and melancholy moralists," who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. "Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men." Adam Smith opposes this "extreme sympathy" as altogether absurd and unreasonable; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser's relief.

Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson's celebrated passage:

"Ah! little think the gay licentious proud,

Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround;
They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth,
And wanton, often cruel, riot waste;

Ah! little think they, while they dance along,
How many feel this very moment death

And all the sad variety of pain."

Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings: moving accidents by flood and fire,-pining want, and dungeon glooms, the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery-sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc.

"Thought fond man

Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills
That one incessant struggle render life
One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate,
Vice in his high career would stand appalled,
And heedless rambling impulsé learn to think;
The conscious heart of charity would warm,
And her wide wish benevolence dilate;
The social tear would rise, the social sigh,
And into clear perfection, gradual bliss,
Refining still, the social passions work."

This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed,-this, perhaps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed, So Burns

"O ye who, sunk in beds of down,

Feel not a want but what yourselves create,
Think for a moment on his wretched fate
Whom friends and fortune quite disown.
Ill-satisfied keen nature's clam'rous call,

Stretch'd on his straw he lays himself to sleep,
While through the ragged roof and chinky wall,
Chill, o'er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap.

Not so serenely does Bishop Jeremy Taylor imagine a gazer from the skies to look down on the sorrows of this earth of ours, in the celebrated paragraph beginning, "But if we could from one of the battlements of heaven espy how many men and women lie fainting and dying," etc. And, by the way, there is another of Crabbe's Tales, in which, too late, a self-upbraiding spirit thus accuses itself for neglecting a ruined wrong-doer, whose death she has just discovered:

"To have this money in my purse-to know

What grief was his, and what to grief we owe;

To see him often, always to conceive

How he must pine and languish, groan and grieve ;*
And every day in ease and peace to dine,

And rest in comfort !-what a heart is mine!"

Richard Savage, as Mr. Whitehead pictures him, bitterly conversant with cold and hunger, a houseless vagrant through the streets by night, and a famishing lounger in them by day, apostrophises Mr. Overseer in his pursy prosperity, much as (mutatis mutandis) Lear apostrophises pomp. "Turn out, fat man of substance, and bob for wisdom and charity on the banks of Southwark. They are best taken at night, when God only sees you-when the east wind is abroad, making you shake like the sinner who was hanged for breaking into your dwelling-house. The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,' sayest thou? It is so. But tell me whether, on the fourth night, when thou liest stretched on thy blessed bed, thy heart is not warmer than it was wont to be-whether thou dost not pray prayers of long omission-whether thou wilt not, in the morning, bethink thee of the poor, and relieve them out of thy abundance? Sayest thou, no? God help thee!" As Van den Bosch tells the big-wigs of Ghent,

*Earlier in the tale there is a touch to remind us of Lear on the heath:

"Know you his conduct?' 'Yes, indeed, I know,
And how he wanders in the wind and snow;
Safe in our rooms the threatening storm we hear,
But he feels strongly what we faintly fear.""

"Ah, sirs, you know not, you, who lies afield
When nights are cold, with frogs for bedfellows;
You know not, you, who fights and sheds his blood,
And fasts and fills his belly with the east wind."

Diderot rose one Shrove Tuesday morning, and groping in his pocket, found nothing wherewith to dine that day-which he spent in wandering about Paris and its precincts. He was ill when he got back to his quarters, went to bed, and was treated by his landlady to a little toast and wine. "That day," he often told a friend, in after life, "I swore that, if ever I came to have anything, I would never in my life refuse a poor man help, never condemn my fellow-creature to a day as painful." As the sailor says, after the wreck, in one of Mr. Roscoe's tragedies: "We may be wrecked a dozen times, for what our betters care; but being aboard themselves, they see some spice of danger in it, and that breeds a fellow-feeling." And, proverbially, a fellow-feeling makes us wondrous kind.

Mr. Ruskin demands whether, even supposing it guiltless, luxury would be desired by any of us, if we saw clearly at our sides the suffering which accompanies it in the world. "Luxury is indeed possible in the future-innocent and exquisite; luxury for all, and by the help of all; but luxury at present can only be enjoyed by the ignorant; the cruelest man living could not sit at his feast, unless he sat blindfold."

Gibbon records to the honour of at least one Pontiff's temporal government of Rome, that he-Gregory the Greatrelieved by the bounty of each day, and of every hour, the instant distress of the sick and needy-his treasurers being continually summoned to satisfy, in his name, the requirements of indigence and merit. "Nor would the pontiff indulge himself in a frugal repast, till he had sent the dishes from his own table to some objects deserving of his compassion." A non possumus this, in its beneficent nisi prius scope, more appreciable by Protestants at least than that of some other Holy Fathers. A sovran's interest in the sufferings of his or her subjects is always of exceptional interest in the eyes of fellowsubjects. Leigh Hunt knew this, when he pictured, in her

early happy wifehood, our Sovran Lady the Queen of these realms,

"Too generous-happy to endure

The thought of all the woful poor

Who that same night lay down their heads

In mockeries of starving beds,

In cold, in wet, disease, despair,
In madness that will say no prayer ;
With wailing infants some; and some
By whom the little clay lies dumb;
And some, whom feeble love's excess,
Through terror, tempts to murderousness.
And at that thought the big drops rose
In pity for her people's woes;
And this glad mother and great queen
Weeping for the poor was seen,

And vowing in her princely will

That they should thrive and bless her still."

Madame de Chevreuse, in a popular French romance, is made to say to, and at, Anne of Austria, that kings are so far removed from other people, from the "vulgar herd," that they forget that others ever stand in need of the bare necessaries of life. She likens them to the dweller on African mountains, who, gazing from the verdant table-land, refreshed by the rills of melted snow, cannot comprehend that the dwellers in the plains below him are perishing from hunger and thirst in the midst of their lands, burnt up by the heat of the sun. When, in the same romance-by courtesy historical; only the proportion of history to romance in it is much about that of Falstaff's bread bill to his running account for sack-one of Anne of Austria's sons, the reigning king, young Lewis the Fourteenth, is substituted in the Bastille for his ill-starred brother, and so comes to taste of suffering in propria persona,―the royal prisoner tries to remember at what hour the first repast is served to the captives in that fortressbut his ignorance of this detail occasions a feeling of remorse that smites him like the keen thrust of a dagger: "that he should have lived for five and twenty years a king, and in the