eminence; but in this he was mistaken: civil polity," &c., &c.-Too true! it is man's lot to err. However, Destiny, in all ways, means to prove the mistaken Samuel, and see what stuff is in him. He must leave these butteries of Oxford, Want like an armed man compelling him; retreat into his father's mean home; and there abandon himself for a season to inaction, disappointment, shame, and nervous melancholy nigh run mad; he is probably the wretchedest man in wide England. In all ways, he too must "become perfect through suffering."-High thoughts have visited him; his College Exercises have been praised beyond the walls of College; Pope himself has seen that Translation, and approved of it: Samuel had whispered to himself: I too am "one and somewhat." False thoughts; that leave only misery behind! The fever-fire of Ambition is too painfully extinguished (but not cured) in the frost-bath of Poverty. Johnson has knocked at the gate, as one having a right; but there was no opening: the world lies all encircled as with brass; nowhere can he find or force the smallest entrance. ushership at Market Bosworth, and "a disagreement between him and Sir Wolstan Dixie, the Patron of the school," yields him bread of affliction and water of affliction; but so bitter, that unassisted human nature cannot swallow them. Young Samson will grind no more in the Philistine mill of Bosworth; quits hold of Sir Wolstan and the "domestic chaplaincy, so far at least as to say grace at table," and also to be "treated with what he represented as intolerable harshness;" and so, after "some months of such complicated misery," feeling doubtless that there are worse things in the world than quick death by Famine, "relinquishes a situation, which all his life after wards he recollected with the strongest aversion, and even horror." Men like Johnson are properly called the Forlorn Hope of the World: judge whether his hope was forlorn or not, by this letter to a dull oily Printer, who called himself Sylvanus Urban: no shelter:" Johnson learns to be contented with humble human things; and is there not already an actually realized human Existence, all stirring and living on every hand of him! Go thou and do likewise! In Birmingham itsel, with his own purchased goose-quill, he can earn "five pounds;" nay, finally, the choicest terrestrial good: a Friend, who will be Wife to him! Johnson's marriage with the good Widow Porter has been treated with ridicule by many mortals, who apparently had no understanding thereof. That the purblind, seamy-faced Wildman, stalking lonely, wo stricken, like some Irish Gallow-glass with peeled club, whose speech no man knew, whose look all men both laughed at and shud dered at, should find any brave female heart, to acknowledge, at first sight and hearing of him, "This is the most sensible man I ever met with;" and then, with generous courage, to take him to itself, and say, Be thou mine; be thou warmed here, and thawed into life!— in all this, in the kind Widow's love and pity for him, in Johnson's love and gratitude, there is actually no matter for ridicule. Their wed Anded life, as is the common lot, was made up of drizzle and dry weather; but innocence and worth dwelt in it; and when death had ended it, a certain sacredness: Johnson's deathless affection for his Tetty was always venerable and noble. However, be this as it might, Johnson is now minded to wed; and will live by the trade of Pedagogy, for by this also may life be kept in. Let the world therefore take notice: "A: Edial near Lichfield, in Staffordshire, young gen lemen are boarded, and taught the Latin and Greek languages, by SAMUEL JOHNSON." Had this Edial enterprise prospered, how dif ferent might the issue have been! Johnson had lived a life of unnoticed nobleness, or swoln into some amorphous Dr. Parr, of no avail to us; Bozzy would have dwindled into official insignificance, or risen by some other elevation; old Auchinleck had never been af flicted with "ane that kept a schule," or obliged to violate hospitality by a "Cromwell do? God, sir, he gart kings ken that there was a lith in their neck!" But the Edial enterprise did not prosper; Destiny had other work appointed for Samuel Johnson; and young gentlemen got board where they could elsewhere find it This man was to become a Teacher of grown gentlemen, in the most surpri.. ng way; a man of Letters, and Ruler of the British Nation for some time,-not of their bodies merely, but of their minds; not over them, but in them. "Sir,-As you appear no less sensible than your readers, of the defect of your poetical article, you will not be displeased if (in order to the improvement of it) I communicate to you the sentiments of a person who will undertake, on reasonable terms, sometimes to fill a column. "His opinion is, that the public would," &c., &c. If such a correspondence will be agreeable to you, be pleased to inform me in two posts, what the conditions are on which you shall expect it. Your late offer (for a Prize Poem) gives me no reason to distrust your generosity. If you engage in any literary projects besides this paper, I have other designs to impart." Reader, the generous person, to whom this Letter goes addressed, is "Mr. Edmund Cave, at St. John's Gate, London; " the addresser of it is Samuel Johnson, in Birmingham, Warwickshire. Nevertheless, Life rallies in the man; re-asBerts its right to be lived, even to be enjoyed. "Better a small bush," say the Scotch, "than The career of Literature could not, in Johnson's day, any more than now, be said to lie along the shores of a Pactolus: whatever else might be gathered there, gold-dust was nowise the chief produce. The world, from the times of Socrates, St. Paul, and far earlier, has always had its Teachers; and always treated them in a peculiar way. A shrewd Town. clerk, (not of Ephesus,) ouce, in founding a Burgh-Seminary, when the question came, How the Schoolmasters should be maintained? delivered this brief_counsel: "D—n them, keep them poor!" Considerable wisdom may lie in this aphorism. At all events, we see, the world has acted on it long, and indeed improved on it,-putting many a Schoolmaster of its great Burgh-Seminary to a death, which even rust it something. The world, it is true, had for some time been too busy to go out of its way, and put any Author to death; however, the old sentence pronounced against them was found to be pretty sufficient. The first Writers (being Monks) were sworn to a vow of Poverty; the modern Authors had no need to swear to it. This was the epoch when an Otway could still die of hunger: not to speak of your innumerable Scrogginses, whom "the Muse found stretched beneath a rug," with "rusty grate unconscious of a fire," stockingnightcap, sanded floor, and all the other escutcheons of the craft, time out of mind the heirlooms of Authorship. Scroggins, however, seems to have been but an idler; not at all so diligent as worthy Mr. Boyce, whom we might have seen sitting up in bed with his wearing apparel of Blanket about him, and a hole slit in the same, that his hand might be at liberty to work in its vocation. The worst was, that too frequently a blackguard recklessness of temper ensued, incapable of turning to account what good the gods even here had provided: your Boyces acted on some stoicoepicurean principle of carpe diem, as men do in bombarded towns, and seasons of raging pestilence; and so had lost not only their life, and presence of mind, but their status as persons of respectability. The trade of Author was about one of its lowest ebbs, when Johnson embarked on it. Accordingly we find no mention of Illuminations in the city of London, when this same Ruler of the British nation arrived in it: no cannon-salvoes are fired; no flourish of drums and trumpets greets his appearance on the scene. He enters quite quietly, with some copper half-pence in his pocket; creeps into lodgings in Exeter Street, Strand; and has a Coronation Pontiff also, of not less peculiar equipment, whom, with all submissiveness, he must wait upon, in his Vatican of St. John's Gate. This is the dull oily Printer alluded to above. "Cave's temper," says our Knight Hawkins, "was phlegmatic: though he assumed, as the publisher of the Magazine, the name of Sylvanus Urban, he had few of those qualities that constitute urbanity. Judge of his want of them by this question, which he once put to an author: "Mr., I hear you have just published a pamphlet, and am told there is a very good paragraph in it upon the subject of music: did you write that yourself?" His discernment was also slow; and as he had already at his command some writers of prose and verse, who, in the language of Booksellers, are called good hands, he was the backwarder in making advances, or courting an intimacy with Johnson. Upon the first approach of a stranger, his practice was to continue sitting; a posture in which he was ever to be found, and for a few minutes to continue silent: if at any time he was inclined to begin the discourse, it was generally by putting a leaf of the Magazine, then in the press, into the hand of his visitor, and asking his opinion of it. 42 | "He was so incompetent a judge of John son's abilities, that meaning at one time to dazzle him with the splendour of some of those luminaries in Literature, who favoured him with their correspondence, he told him that if he would, in the evening, be at a certain alehouse in the neighbourhood of Clerken well, he might have a chance of seeing Mr. Browne and another or two of those illustrious contributors: Johnson accepted the invitation; and being introduced by Cave, dressed in a loose horseman's coat, and such a great bushy wig as he constantly wore, to the sight of Mr. Browne, whom he found sitting at the upper end of a long table, in a cloud of tobacco-smoke, had his curiosity gratified.”— Hawkins, 46–50. In fact, if we look seriously into the condi tion of Authorship at that period, we shall find that Johnson had undertaken one of the ruggedest of all possible enterprises; that here, as elsewhere, Fortune had given him unspeakable Contradictions to reconcile. For à man of Johnson's stamp, the Problem was twofold: First, not only as the humble but indispensa ble condition of all else, to keep himself, if so might be, alive; but secondly, to keep himself alive by speaking forth the Truh that was in him, and speaking it truly, that is, in the clearest and fittest utterance the Heavens had enabled him to give it, let the earth say to this what she liked. Of which twofold Problem if it be hard to solve either member separately, how incalculably more so to solve it, when both are conjoined, and work with endless complication into one another! He that finds himself already kept alive can sometimes unhappily not always speak a little truth; he that finds himself able and willing, to all lengths, to speak lies, may, by watching how the wind sits, scrape together a livelihood, sometimes of great splendour: he, again, who finds himself provided with neither endowment, has but a ticklish game to play, and shall have praises if he win it. Let us look a little at both faces of the matter; and see what front they then offered our Adventurer, what frout he offered them. At the time of Johnson's appearance on the field, Literature, in many senses, was in a transitional state; chiefly in this sense, as respects the pecuniary subsistence of its cultivators. It was in the very act of passing from the protection of Patrons into that of the Public; no longer to supply its necessities by laudatory Dedications to the Great, but by judicious Bargains with the Booksellers. This happy change has been much sung and celebrated; many a "lord of the lion heart and eagle-eye" looking back with scorn enough on the bygone system of Dependency: so that now it were perhaps well to consider, for a moment, what good might also be in it, what gratitude we owe it. That a good was in it, admits not of doubt. Whatsoever has existed has had its value: without some truth and worth lying in it, the thing could not have hung together, and been the organ and sustenance, and method of action, for men that reasoned and were alive. Translate a Falsehood which is wholly false into Practice, the result comes out zero; there 2 x 2 ever, in such things, the old system overlaps the new, by some generation or two, and only dies quite out when the new has got a complete organization, and weather-worthy surface of its own. Among the first authors, the very first of any significance, who lived by the day's wages of his craft, and composedly faced the world on that basis, was Samuel Johnson. is no fruit or issue to be derived from it. That in an age, when a Nobleman was still noble, still, with his wealth the protector of worthy and humane things, and still venerated as such, a poor man of Genius, his brother in nobleness, should, with unfeigned reverence, address him and say: "I have found Wisdom here, and would fain proclaim it abroad; wilt thou, of thy abundance, afford me the means?" -in all this there was no baseness; it was wholly an honest proposal, which a free man might make, and a free man listen to. So might a Tasso, with a Gerusalemme in his hand or in his head, speak to a Duke of Ferrara; so might a Shakspeare to his Southampton; and Continental Artists generally to their rich Protectors,-in some countries, down almost to these days. It was only when the reverence became fugned, that baseness entered into the transaction on both sides; and, indeed, flourished there with rapid luxuriance, till that became disgraceful for a Dryden, which a Shak-headedness and disgust, (so that an Osborne speare could once practise without offence. At the time of Johnson's appearance, there were still two ways, on which an Author might attempt proceeding; there were the Mæcenases proper in the West End of London; and the Maecenases virtual of St. John's Gate and Paternoster Row. To a considerate man it might seem uncertain which methods were preferable: neither had very high attractions; the Patron's aid was now wellnigh necessarily polluted by sycophancy, before it could come to hand; the Bookseller's was deformed with greedy stupidity, not to say entire wooden what they were; but found, at first trial, that the former would in no wise do for him. Listen, once again, to that far-famed Blast of Doom, proclaiming into the ear of Lord Chesterfield, and, through him, of the listening world, that Patronage should be no more! even required to be knocked down, by an Neither, it is very true, was the new way author of spirit,) and could barely keep the of Bookseller Mæcenasship worthless; which thread of life together. The one was the opened itself at this juncture, for the most im- wages of suffering and poverty; the other. portant of all transport-trades, now when the old unless you gave strict heed to it, the wages of way had become too miry and impassable. Re- sin. In time, Johnson had opportunity of mark, moreover, how this second sort of Mace-looking into both methods, and ascertaining nasship, after carrying us through nearly a century of Literary Time, appears now to have wellnigh discharged its functions also; and to be working pretty rapidly towards some third method, the exact conditions of which are yet nowise visible. Thus all things have their end; and we should part with them all, not in anger but in peace. The Bookseller System, during its peculiar century, the whole of the eighteenth, did carry us handsomely along; and many good Works it has left us, and many good Men it maintained: if it is now expiring, by PUFFERY, as the Patronage System did by FLATTERY, (for Lying is ever the forerunner of Death, nay is itself Death,) let us not forget its benefits; how it nursed Literature through boyhood and school-years, as Patronage had wrapped it in soft swaddling bands;-till now we see it about to put on the toga virilis, could it but find any such! There is tolerable travelling on the beaten road run how it may; only on the new road, not yet levelled and paved, and on the old road, all broken into ruts and quagmires, is the travelling bad or impracticable. The difficulty lies always in the transition from one method to another. In which state it was that Johnson now found Literature; and out of which, let us also say, he manfully carried it. What remarkable mortal first paid copyright in England we have not ascertained; perhaps for almost a century before, some scarce visible or ponderable pittance of wages had occasionally been yielded by the Seller of Books to the Writer of them: the original Covenant, stipulating to produce Paradise Lost on the one hand, and Five Pounds Sterling on the other, still lies, (we have been told,) in black-onwhite for inspection and purchase by the curious, at a Bookshop in Chancery Lane. Thus had the matter gone on, in a mixed, confused way, for some threescore years;-as "Seven years, my Lord, have now passed, since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door; during which time I have been pushing on my work* through difficulties, of which it is useless to complain, and have brought it at last to the verge of publication, without one act of assistance, one word of encouragement, or one smile of favour. "The shepherd in Virgil grew at last acquainted with Love, and found him a native of the rocks. "Is not a patron, my Lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labours, had it been early, had been kind: but it has been delayed till I am indifferent and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary and cannot impart it; till I am known and do not want it. I hope, it is no very cynical asperity, not to confess obligations, where no benefit has been received, or to be unwilling that the public should consider me as owing that to a patron which Providence has enabled me to do for myself. The English Dictionary. +Were time and printer's space of no value, it were easy to wash away certain foolish soot-stains dropped here as "Notes" especially two: the one on this word (and on Boswell's Note to it ;) the other on the paragraph which follows. Let "En." look a second time; he will find that Johnson's sacred regard for Truth is in the latter, that this of "Love's being a native of the the only thing to be noted," in the former case; also, rocks" actually has a "meaning." "Having carried on my Work thus far with | Soul and Body, have commenced their open so little obligation to any favourer of learning; quarrel, and are suing for a separate mainteI shall not be disappointed though I should nance, as if they could exist separately. To conclude it, if less be possible, with less: for the earnest mind, in any position, firm footing I have long been awakened from that dream and a life of Truth was becoming daily more of hope, in which I once boasted myself with difficult: in Johnson's position, it was more so much exultation. difficult than in almost any other. "My Lord, your Lordship's most humble, most obedient servant, "SAM. JOHNSON." If, as for a devout nature was inevitable and indispensable, he looked up to Religion, as to the pole-star of his voyage, already there was And thus must the rebellious "Sam. Johnson" no fixed pole-star any longer visible; but two turn him to the Bookselling guild, and the stars, a whole constellation of stars, each prowondrous chaos of "Author by trade;" and, claiming itself as the true. There was the red though ushered into it only by that dull oily portentous comet-star of Infidelity; the dimPrinter," with loose horseman's coat, and such mer and dimmer-burning fixed-star (uncertain a great bushy wig as he constantly wore," and now whether not an atmospheric meteor) of only as subaltern to some commanding-officer, Orthodoxy: which of these to choose? The "Browne, sitting amid tobacco-smoke at the keener intellects of Europe had, almost withhead of a long table in the alehouse at Clerk-out exception, ranged themselves under the enwell," gird himself together for the war- former: for some half-century, it had been fare; having no alternative! the general effort of European Speculation to proclaim that Destruction of Falsehood was the only Truth; daily had Denial waxed stronger and stronger, Belief sunk more and more into decay. From our Bolingbrokes and Tolands, the skeptical fever had passed into France, into Scotland; and already it smouldered, far and wide, secretly eating out the heart of England. Bayle had played his part; Voltaire, on a wider theatre, was playing his,Johnson's senior by some fifteen years: Hume and Johnson were children of the same year. To this keener order of intellects did Johnson's indisputably belong: was he to join them? Was he to oppose them? A complicated question: for, alas! the Church itself is no longer, even to him, wholly of true adamant, but of adamant and baked mud conjoined: the zealously Devout must find his Church tottering; and pause amazed to see, instead of inspired Priest, many a swine-feeding Trulliber ministering at her altar. It is not the least curious of the incoherences which Johnson had to reconcile, that, though by nature contemptuous and incredulous, he was, at that time of day, to find his safety and glory in defending, with his whole might, the traditions of the elders. Little less contradictory was that other branch of the two-fold Problem now set before Johnson: the speaking forth of Truth. Nay, taken by itself, it had in those days become so complex as to puzzle strongest heads, with nothing else imposed on them for solution; and even to turn high heads of that sort into mere hollow vizards, speaking neither truth nor falsehood, nor any thing but what the Prompter and Player (ingris) put into them. Alas! for poor Johnson, Contradiction abounded; in spirituals and in temporals, within and without. Born with the strongest unconquerable love of just Insight, he must begin to live and learn in a scene where Prejudice flourishes with rank luxuriance. England was all confused enough, sightless and yet restless, take it where you would; but figure the best intellect in England nursed up to manhood in the idol-cavern of a poor Tradesman's house, in the cathedral city of Lichfield! What is Truth? said jesting Pilate; What is Truth? might earnest Johnson much more emphatically say. Truth, no longer, like the Phoenix, in rainbow plumage, "poured, from her glittering beak, such tones of sweetest melody as took captive every ear:" the Phoenix (waxing old) had wellnigh ceased her singing, and empty wearisome Cuckoos, and doleful monotonous Owls, innumerable Jays also, and twittering Sparrows on the housetop, pretended they were repeating her. It was wholly a divided age, that of Johnson; Unity existed nowhere, in its Heaven, or in its Earth. Society, through every fibre, was rent asunder: all things, it was then becoming visible, but could not then be understood, were moving onwards, with an impulse received ages before, yet now first with a decisive rapidity, towards that great chaotic gulf, where, whether in the shape of French Revolutions, Reform Bills, or what shape soever, bloody or bloodless, the descent and engulfment assume, we now see them weltering and boiling. Already Cant, as once before hinted, had begun to play its wonderful part (for the hour was come): two ghastly Apparitions, unreal simulacra both, HYPOCRISY and ATHEISM, are already, in silence, parting the world. Opinion and Action, which should live together as wedded pair, "one flesh," more properly as Not less perplexingly intricate, and on both sides hollow or questionable, was the aspect of Politics. Whigs struggling blindly for ward, Tories holding blindly back; each with some forecast of a half truth; neither with any forecast of the whole! Admire here this other Contradiction in the life of Johnson: that, though the most ungovernable, and in practice the most independent of men, he must be a Jacobite, and worshipper of the Divine Right. In politics also there are Irreconcilables enough for him. As, indeed, how could it be otherwise? For when religion is torn asunder, and the very heart of man's exist. ence set against itself, then, in all subordinate departments there must needs be hollowness, incoherence. The English Nation had rebelled against a Tyrant; and, by the hands of religious tyrannicides, exacted stern vengeance of him: Democracy had risen iron-sinewed, and "like an infant Hercules, strangled serpents in its cradle." But as yet none knew the meaning or extent of the phenomenon. Europe was not ripe for it; not to be ripened | ascertainment and feeling of his Duty as an for it, but by the culture and various experience of another century and half. And now, when the King-killers were all swept away, and a milder second picture was painted over the canvas of the first, and betitled "Glorious Revolution," who doubted but the catastrophe was over, the whole business finished, and Democracy gone to its long sleep? Yet was it like a business finished and not finished; a lingering uneasiness dwelt in all minds: the deep-lying, resistless Tendency, which had still to be obeyed, could no longer be recognised; thus was there half-ness, insincerity, uncertainty in men's ways; instead of heroic Puritans and heroic Cavaliers, came now a dawdling set of argumentative Whigs, and a dawdling set of deaf-eared Tories; each half-foolish, each half-false. The Whigs were false and without basis; inasmuch as their whole object was Resistance, Criticism, Demolition,-they knew not why, or towards what issue. In Whiggism, ever since a Charles and his Jeffries had ceased to meddle with it, and to have any Russel or Sidney to meddle with, there could be no divineness of character; not till, in these latter days, it took the figure of a thorough-going, all-defying Radicalism, was there any solid footing for it to stand on. Of the like uncertain, half-hollow nature had Toryism become, in Johnson's time; preaching forth indeed an everlasting truth, the duty of Loyalty; yet now (ever since the final expulsion of the Stuarts), having no Person but only an Office to be loyal to, no living Soul to worship, but only a dead velvet-cushioned Chair. Its attitude, therefore, was stiff-necked refusal to move; as that of Whiggism was clamorous command to move,―let rhyme and reason, on both hands, say to it what they might. The consequence was: Immeasurable floods of contentious jargon, tending nowhither; false conviction; false resistance to conviction; decay (ultimately to become decease) of whatsoever was once understood by the words, Principle, or Honesty of heart; the louder and louder triumph of H-ness and Plausibility over Whole-ness and Truth;-at last, this allovershadowing efflorescence of QUACKERY, which we now see, with all its deadening and killing fruits, in all its innumerable branches, down to the lowest. How, between these jarring extremes, wherein the rotten lay so inextricably intermingled with the sound, and as yet no eye could see through the ulterior meaning of the matter, was a faithful and true man to adjust himself? That Johnson, in spite of all drawbacks, adopted the Conservative side; stationed himself as the unyielding opponent of Innovation, resolute to hold fast the form of sound words, could not but increase, in no'small measure, the difficulties he had to strive with. We mean, the moral difficulties; for in economical respects, it might be pretty equally balanced; the Tory servant of the Public had perhaps about the same chance of promotion as the Whig and all the promotion Johnson aimed at was the privilege to live. But, for what, though unavowed, was no less indispensable, tor his peace of conscience, and the clear inhabitant of God's world, the case was hereby rendered much more complex. To resist Innovation is easy enough on one condition: that you resist Inquiry. This is, and was, the common expedient of your common Conservatives; but it would not do for Johnson: he was a zealous recommender and practiser of Inquiry; once for all, could not and would not believe, much less speak and act, a Falsehood; the form of sound words, which he held fast, must have a meaning in it. Here lay the difficulty: to behold a portentous mixture of True and False, and feel that he must dwell and fight there; yet to love and defend only the True. How worship, when you cannot and will not be an idolater; yet cannot help discerning that the Symbol of your Divinity has half become idolatrous? This was the question, which Johnson, the man both of clear eye and devout believing heart, must answer-at peril of his life. The Whig or Skeptic, on the other hand, had a much simpler part to play. To him only the idolatrous side of things, nowise the divine one, lay visible: not worship, therefore, nay in the strict sense not hearthonesty, only at most lip, and hand-honesty, is required of him. What spiritual force is his, he can conscientiously employ in the work of cavilling, of pulling down what is False. For the rest, that there is or can be any Truth of a higher than sensual nature, has not occurred to him. The utmost, therefore, that he as man has to aim at, is RESPECTABILITY, the suffrages of his fellow-men. Such suffrages he may weigh as well as count; or count only: according as he is a Burke, or a Wilkes. But beyond these there lies nothing divine for him; these attained, all is attained. Thus is his whole world distinct and rounded in; a clear goal is set before him; a firm path, rougher or smoother; at worst a firm region wherein to seek a path: let him gird up his loins, and travel on without misgivings! For the honest Conservative, again, nothing is distinct, nothing rounded in: RESPECTABILITY can nowise be his highest Godhead; not one aim, but two conflicting aims to be continually reconciled by him, has he to strive after. A difficult posi tion, as we said; which accordingly the most did, even in those days, but half defend.-by the surrender, namely, of their own too cumbersome honesty or even understanding: after which the completest defence was worth little. Into this difficult position Johnson, neverthe less, threw himself: found it indeed full of difficulties; yet held it out manfully, as an honest-hearted, open-sighted man, while the life was in him. Such was that same "twofold Problem" set before Samuel Johnson. Consider all these moral difficulties; and add to them the fearful aggravation, which lay in that other circum stance, that he needed a continual appeal to the Public, must continually produce a certain impression and conviction on the Public; that if he did not, he ceased to have "provision for the day that was passing over him,” he could not any longer live! How a vulgar character, once launched into this wild element; driven onwards by Fear and Famine: without other |