have a great contempt for their habits and understandings. John Anderson alone pleased him. He would frequently walk to his mill, where he would pass long winter evenings in conversation with the youthful pair, filling them with admiration of his courage and the perils he had sustained. The stranger frequently declared, that it was a shame so fine a youth as Anderson should be pent up for life in a crazy mill;-that he could show him the way to honour and riches ;-and that his courage and address would win for him the proudest distinctions. It was thus that the once-contented young man gradually acquired a dislike of his occupation; and, as a natural consequence, he was less industrious. A change in the markets about the same time deprived him of a considerable portion of his little savings;-he did not attempt to redeem his loss by increased exertion, but was frequently from home, and sometimes left his wife alone to hear the hollow wind whistle through their solitary and exposed cottage. It was evident that the stranger had acquired a fatal influence upon his mind;-and those who loved him, and they were not a few, bitterly regretted that the seafaring man had ever lighted upon their village.

It was late on an evening in the dreariest season of the year, that Anderson and the Captain (for so the villagers called the stranger) came in a hurried way to the publichouse. They sat for some time drinking freely. The spirits of the stranger became elevated at every draught to a fearful sort of desperation ;-Anderson attempted to be gay, but a sigh occasionally escaped him, and he then seized the glass with a frantic haste. He at last became, what the landlord had never before seen, half intoxicated. A whistle was heard without. The stranger instantly grew collected; and in a minute threw off the influence of the liquor. He said, in a low but determined voice, to Anderson, "It is time."

They left the house. The landlord suspected that something would be wrong, and sat up till a late hour. It was near midnight when he heard firing. He rushed, with some country people, in the direction of the sound, and found on the beach a small party of revenue-officers

engaged with a gang of smugglers. The officers were overpowered with numbers, and made a hasty retreat. But the smugglers were not confident in their strength; a boat pushed to the shore, and the desperate offenders against the laws hastily embarked. The landlord went to the beach when all was quiet, and he there found the unhappy Anderson, mortally wounded.

The dying man had sufficient strength to declare, that after a long course of entreaty, supported by the most delusive arguments, he had been induced that fatal night, for the first time, to engage in the desperate career of a smuggler. "He had justly forfeited his life," he said, "to his abandonment of the peaceful and virtuous course which a wise Providence had marked out for him. His wife"- death relieved him of his bitterest recollection. The scene that followed, when his corpse was borne to the 'cottage where his happiness seemed to be so deeply rooted, I cannot attempt to describe. I saw the havoc which that scene had produced. I returned home, I hope, a wiser and a better man. "Let him who standeth take heed lest he fall."

ON INCONSISTENT EXPECTATIONS OF WORLDLY PROSPERITY.

THERE is not a more common error of self-deception than a habit of considering our stations in life so illsuited to our powers as to be unworthy of calling out a full and proper exercise of our virtues and talents. More or less, there is a disposition in all of us to live in some imaginary sphere of repose or activity, where our duties might agree with those preconceptions of happiness, which we have been accustomed to dwell on with a fond satisfaction. Perhaps even the most idle and profligate are in the habit of consoling themselves with the belief, that were they thrown upon a field of action where their industry might conduct them to renown or fortune, or

their sobriety be incited by domestic happiness, they would abjure their errors, and live in the world as useful and honourable citizens. Against the indulgence of this delusive and dangerous feeling, a few plain observations may not be improperly directed.

A certain well-regulated habit of looking beyond our immediate situations is justly considered the parent of all laudable enterprises. This is that noble ambition, which, coolly regarding the indistinct expanse of the future, traces out a road of consistent well-doing. The weak man casts his eye across the sea of time, and, viewing no furrowed path, commits his vessel at random to the waves: the prudent and keen-sighted looks out upon the same trackless way, but he has a compass to guide him to the haven of prosperity and fame. The one yields to every blast and wave of adverse fortune; and too indolent to profit by the gale, and too weak to struggle with the storm, he is tossed about without pity or succour, or wrecked upon the quicksands which he has not learnt to shun: the other, however harassed or retarded, however borne down by the current of unavoidable necessity, overcomes the dangers and difficulties of his course, and obtains the prize for which he has contended; he has exclaimed with Milton,

"I argue not

Against Heaven's hand or will; nor bate one jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer
Right onwards."

The complaining impatience of caprice or discontent, remote as it is from everything like exalted determination, has often been mistaken for this noble consistency in looking beyond the present. The difference is sufficiently clear. He who pursues a future happiness, or prosperity, or honour, by the right path, does not cast away the good in his possession, nor neglect the duties which lie before him; but he endeavours to shape them, by slow degrees, to that model of perfection which his feelings or his reason have set up. On the other hand, he who views some distant object of desire, without connecting it

with his immediate obligations, neither attains the blessings within his reach, nor approaches a single step to the ideal good; he has cast away the link which connects the present with the future. Should the Almighty Disposer of events go out of the usual course to bestow that by chance which He ordinarily reserves for exertion, it is only to manifest the justice of his dispensations in a more striking way, by giving an outward blessing without granting an inward capacity for its enjoyment. No man knows the value of happiness, who has not diligently sought it by regular virtues and consistent resolves.

There are two classes of persons who are peculiarly exposed to the influence of these dangerous principles. The one is composed of those who possess too much ability and information to be contented with the drudgery of mechanical occupations, and too little to perceive the possibility of giving a lustre to their proper employments by diligence and skill. The other comprises all those unhappy persons who have too acute feelings to live amidst disquietude and dependence, and too little firmness of purpose to emancipate themselves by resolute enterprise, or assiduous forbearance. The course of each of these characters is illustrated by a thousand fatal examples. We will attempt a little counsel to any who may find themselves in such situations.

As society is regulated, there cannot be many employments which demand very brilliant talents, or great delicacy of taste for their proper discharge. The constitution of the social world adapts itself to the order of the natural; and we shall there find that not one in a thousand possesses that mental organization which belongs to the legislator, the poet, or the artist. The great rule

which nature has laid down in the formation of the human mind is moderation. She has sometimes finished her performances with the most scrupulous exactness; has sometimes sent them forth shapeless and rude; but the mass of her operations neither attract by their beauty nor disgust by their deformity; they are like those productions of art which contribute to the comforts of life, without being useless from their delicacy, or inconvenient

from their roughness. It is thus we see that the great bulk of society, the really useful part, is composed of plain, plodding men, who move "right onwards" to the sober duties of their calling; these are the profitable bees of the hive, who neither envy the drones nor the butterflies by which they are surrounded. At the same time the universal good demands that those whom nature has greatly endowed should leave the ordinary track to take up higher and more ennobling duties. Society owes much of its safety and most of its pleasures to their exertions. The difficulty consists in the general incapacity of men to determine on their own powers; to distinguish between the inflations of vanity and the inspirations of talent. No man highly gifted ever left the drudgery of an ignoble station without success; thousands partially endowed with some brilliant quality, have rushed from the safety of obscure competence to perish amidst the poverty and mortification of all those who aspire to the exercise of arts to which they are unequal. Here then is the danger. The sober duties of an industrious vocation are despised, to contemplate, with a feverish restlessness, the tempting honours of some situation in which merit and success are conceived to be inseparably united. England, happily for us, is full of bright examples of the greatest men raised from the meanest situations; and the education which England is now almost universally bestowing upon her children will multiply these examples. But the diffusion of knowledge will also multiply the victims of that evil principle which postpones the discharge of present and immediate duties, for the anticipations of some destiny above the drudgeries of a handicraftman, or the tiresome calculations of a shopkeeper. Let it not be imagined that even some of the poorest and humblest in station are unvisited by such feelings. The examples are perhaps not so common as in the class just above them. But every village can tell its tale of the forward lad of the Sunday School becoming the oracle of the alehouse, and by a regular gradation sinking into a dreaming idler, and a wretched vagabond. To a youth full of sanguine and therefore