you

more pleasing in his sight, than by the lazy devotion of the recluse, or the frantic reveries of the enthusiast. Promoting in these young ones a spirit of industry, you close up the avenues of the heart against many temptations; you inspire them with a right sense of the character they have to support in the world; and furnish them with the means of supporting it effectually and honourably. You qualify them for the different tasks they will hereafter be called upon to perform; and in those qualifications you reap for yourselves the fruit of their sobriety, their diligence, and their probity. You rescue them from the clamorous and corrupting conversations of thoughtless and shameless companions. You guard them from those humiliating wants and pernicious examples, to which they are exposed by the sloth or the profligacy of their parents. You give suppleness to their limbs, and cheerfulness to their tempers in the endurance of toils, to which levity or indolence might make them averse. You teach them to attach a sense of merit and utility to the tasks in which they may be now engaged, and to those for which they may be hereafter destined, you bid them lay out their talents, not in a wild and wasteful ostentation, but in pursuits which have a close relation to their own personal happiness, and the general prosperity of the community.

Such are your intentions in the labour that you appoint for them; and who among you that has either watched the conduct of these children in the course of their education, or traced it in the effects of their riper years, will harbour any latent doubts

on the usefulness of your institution, or start any fantastic cavils against the recommendation of industry as conducive to its most important ends? I have no reason to doubt but that the tasks which you allot them are well adapted to their situation, their capacity, and their age. age. But you will permit me to suggest some cautions, which I know to be of considerable moment; and the neglect of which I have often had occasion to lament on the employment of the poor. By close confinement, and by drudgery far too severe for the tenderness of their bodily frame, children under the command of imperious task-masters are condemned to suffer excessive pain, and so lay up stores of disease and weakness, which embitter their lives and hasten their dissolution. Too little attention, I fear, is usually given to the feeble structure of their organs, to the variety of their bodily constitutions, and to that wonderful economy, by which nature gradually and silently prepares the different paths of our frame for their different uses, in the different stages of infancy, boyhood, puberty, and manhood. Hence we often see the children of the poor with pallid countenances, with emaciated bodies, with tottering joints, with dejected spirits, and with all the alarming symptoms of premature old age, or of acute maladies, which suddenly strike them down to the grave. Impure air, scanty or putrid diet, postures of the body long continued, punctures of the flesh long neglected, excessive contraction or dilatation of the muscles, and excruciating distortions and luxations of the limbs occasioned by violent strains,

striking and most important advantage over charitable foundations, which have been erected by the piety and the benevolence of well-meaning persons. In countries like Italy and Spain, where many hospitals have been built, poverty has been increased rather than diminished; and in the pursuit of unattainable good, the founders have done much eventual and almost irremediable harm. They have given the poor an interest in sloth, and in effect have instituted prizes for the most incorrigible sluggards. Hence have issued the swarms of loiterers and sturdy mendicants that infest the streets; and hence has arisen a void in the labour and wealth of the public stock. Evils have been guarded against that no longer exist, as in the case of the numerous Lazarettos that were established on the return of the Europeans from Asia, when leprosy was frequent. Good was designed, which no longer can be obtained, because new forms of society have grown up, and the poor, who for want of employment were formerly compelled to beg their bread at the stately gate of the noble, or the retired mansions of the religious, may now be more usefully employed in trade or agriculture.

Of these founders it were unjust not to acknowledge that they laid down rules well adapted to the manners of their own times, and have enforced the observance of them by the most awful sanctions. But in the course of a few revolving years, and amidst the unforeseen changes of customs and opinions, the gloss of novelty wears away. The original zeal, even of good men, is seen to cool in their

successors. Artifices of evasion are formed successfully-appearances are preserved while realities are neglected. Luxury, unseen and uncontrolled, pampers itself with the revenues that were destined for the relief of indigence. Even the anxious care taken by founders to prevent change in the distribution of their bequests, operates as an evil, by arraying improvement itself in the alarming forms of presumptuous innovation and ungrateful perversion.

A writer whom I have long classed among the most virtuous patriots and profoundest statesmen of his age, employed much care in the investigation and remedy of mischiefs from which your charityschools, I suppose, are happily exempt. For a glow of generous enthusiasm, he expatiates upon the voluntary associations established in the British empire. He speaks with rapture of their beneficial effects among a rival people. He holds them up to the wonder and imitation of his own countrymen, and for their encouragement he points out the example of one town in France (Bayeux) where beggary had been suppressed by the well-directed measures of the inhabitants, who had associated to furnish employments for those who were capable of enduring it, and alms for those who were not.

The spirit of this great and good man rests, I would hope, in the mansions of the blessed. And though in common with all the friends of mankind I have sometimes lamented his death, yet the disasters which succeeded it have convinced me, that even here the dispensation of Providence was most

merciful. By that event, which the best and wisest of his countrymen have not yet ceased to mourn, he was himself delivered from all the pangs he must have felt, and all the tears he must have shed, at the calamitous scenes that are now passing. At the melancholy fate of a monarch whom, amidst the corruptions of a court and the cabals of competitors, he continued to serve with unshaken fidelity and undiminished affection-at the frightful convulsions of a beloved country, which he strove to rescue from the bonds of slavery and the spells of superstition-at the furious excesses of those misguided and headstrong multitudes whom he wished to train up in all the salutary employments and all the amiable virtues of social life. But though the remains of what was mortal in this man are laid low in the grave; the services he performed will be recorded in the faithful page of history. The fame of his projects has not been obscured by the base and crooked intrigues which supplanted them, and long will it survive the wreck of all the romantic perilous experiments by which those intrigues will in their turn be defeated.

His writings will attract the attention and command the admiration of the latest posterity; and, what is of yet greater moment, his example is at hand to guide the measures and to animate the zeal of every legislator and every governor who may profess to bow down at the name of Jesus. Pardon me, if, while pleading the cause of the poor, I have been eager to pay this tribute to the memory of a man, to whose feeling heart the in