was always particularly simple and to the point. No man, we believe, ever exceeded him in the skill he possessed in conveying ideas from one mind unto another; but he did a great deal more he sent those who really studied him away thinking, and led them to work with a kind of pleasure, which was in some sense distinct from any merely practical or professional in

terest.

He contrived to imbue you with the love of philosophical research in the abstract, with an interest in truth for its own sake; you found yourself remembering the bare facts, not so much from conscious effects of memory as from the interest suggestive of observations with which they were so frequently associated. In going over one of his Lectures alone, they seemed to grow and expand under your own reflections. We know not how to express the effect they produced; they seemed to give new pleasure on repetition, to purify your thoughts scarcely less than they animated your onward studies.

In studying their more suggestive passages, you would now and then feel surprise at the number and variety of important practical relations arising out of a single proposition. We are here merely stating our own early impressions of his power; what we really felt always was, that, great as was the excellence of these Lectures in a scientific or professional sense, there was something more excellent still in the element they contained of intellectual expansion and of moral improvement.

We can not indeed say that they had no faults, but we should be hard driven to point them out; and although we feel how short our attempt to give some idea

of his mode of proceeding must fall of doing him justice, still, if there be any truth at all in our representation, it is quite clear that his negative excellences alone must have employed no ordinary powers. But we must conclude: "Quid multa? istum audiens equidem sic judicare soleo; quidquid aut addideris aut mutaveris aut de traxeris, vitiosius et deterius futurum."

CHAPTER XXIV.

HOR. Is it a custom?

HAMLET. Ay, marry, is't:

But to my mind—though I am native here,

And to the manner born-it is a custom

More honored in the breach than the observance.

HAMLET, Act i., Sc. 4.

If a moralist were to divide his catalogue of immoralities into such as were of general commission and such as occurred in the conduct of the various trades and professions, we fear the latter division would suggest no very flattering position to humanity. An elevation somewhat above less gifted creatures it might be; but still, we fear, it must be at so low a level as to afford but a humiliating indication of the height from which he had fallen. He would, in too many instances perhaps, find his real claims to his high destiny about equal to the shadowy difference between a creature who fulfills some only of his responsibilities, and one who has no responsibilities to fulfill. We should like to hear some grave philosopher discourse on Fashion it is surely a curious thing, for there is a fashion in every thing. It is very like habit, but it is not

habit either. Habit is a garment, which takes some time to fit easily, and is then not abandoned without difficulty. Fashion is always a good fit instanter, but is thrown aside at once without the smallest trouble. The most grotesque or absurd custom which slowlypaced habit bores us with examining, is at once adopted by fashion with a characteristic assentation.

Morals are by no means free from this kind of conventionalism. So much the contrary, that few things evince more strongly the power of fashion. It might be imagined that the multiplication of examples would tend to teach the true nature of the thing exemplified, but it would not seem so with error; tout au contraire. Arts or acts which are tabooed as vicious in the singular number, become, in the plasticity of our moral grammars, very tolerable in the plural. Things that the most hardy shrink from perpetrating single handed, become easy "compliance with custom" when "jointstock" vices; practices which, when partial, men are penetrative enough to discover to be unchristian, or sufficiently sensitive to regard as ungentlemanly, pass muster with marvelous lubricity when they become universal. We can anathematize, with self-complacent indignation, vices in which we have no share, but we become abundantly charitable when we discuss those in which we have a common property; and, finally, moral accounts are settled very much to our own satisfaction, as Butler says, by compounding

"For sins we are inclined to,

By damning those we have no mind to."

After all, society keeps a pretty good look-out after faults of general commission. The law is tolerably comprehensive of things which are of general commis

sion, and mankind sooner or later contrive to catch or successfully oppose the numerous little enormities which slip through the finest of our legal meshes. "Raro antecedentem scelestum,

Deseruit pede pœna claudo."

From all this, it results that moral obliquities which fall within the observation of society make but an uphill game; that which is felt to be prejudicial to the interests of society is easily determined to be vicious. But here again there is much in fashion; for it has often determined that the immorality of an act is not to be measured by the nature of the act, nor the motive even on which it has been founded, so much as by the more refined test afforded by the position of the actor; like a sort of commercial megatherium, one may gorge with rail-way velocity that which a once breathing fond affection and a cold world alike determined to be the life-blood of widows and orphans, and yet have noblemen and others for his associates; he may, perhaps, be a legislator in a great nation, while the poor starveling, who steals for the vulgar purpose of satisfying hunger, may be sent to the treadmill, where he may solve at leisure the problem which "the most enlightened nation on the earth" has thus set him.

Again, vices which have a known influence in disturbing the relations of society are in various ways opposed by the more public influences of religion; so that in the end, although a man may arrive at the conclusion-only by exhausting all other views before he hits on those which lead to it-he finds that honesty is as good a way of getting on as any other; or he may advance perhaps even on this utilitarian creed so

far as to agree with Tillotson, that people take more trouble to get to Hell than would suffice to carry them to Heaven. The immoralities of trades and professions lie in a different position, and involve certain peculiarities which favor their growth and perpetuity.

They are committed in secret; people are proverbially cautious of attacking the weak positions of others, who feel that their own retreats are equally ill defended. This and the established conventionalism of each calling enables an individual to do a good deal off his own bat, without, as one of our bishops happily expressed it, "being caught out." In trade we are sometimes informed that a thing can not be sold cheaperthat the price asked is already less than the cost; and people are appropriately addressed as idiots who every day appear to believe that which common sense shows to be an impossibility.

Your purveyors will sometimes tell you that they are not living by the prices they charge, although you have just ascertained that the same article may be bought at infinitely less cost in the next market. The other day a watch-maker told us that our watch wanted a good deal of looking to, and, among other things, "no doubt cleaning;" but this he discovered, we suppose, by some recondite mesmeric process, in a book which recorded when it had been cleaned last, without looking at the watch at all.

As regards professions, lawyers are said to defend right and wrong with indiscriminate avidity, with the encouraging prospect of obtaining more fruit in maintaining one wrong cause than establishing twenty right.

Then the real nature of these things is, like many