way. Boswell, But, sir, 'tis like walking up and down a hill; one man may naturally do the one better than the other. A hare will run up a hill best from her fore-legs being short; a dog down. Johnson, Nay, sir, that is from mechanical powers. If you make mind mechanical, you may argue in that manner. One mind is a vice, and holds fast; there's a good memory. Another is a file, and he is a disputant, a controversialist. Another is a razor, and he is sarcastical.

A DISCUSSION ON GAMBLING.

Nay, gentlemen, let us not aggravate the matter. It is not roguery to play with a man who is ignorant of the game while you are master of it, and so win his money; for he thinks he can play better than you, as you think you can play better than he, and the superior skill carries it. Erskine, He is a fool, but you are not a rogue. Johnson, That's much about the truth, sir. It must be considered, that a man who only does what every one of the society to which he belongs would do, is not a dishonest man. In the republic of Sparta, it was agreed that steal

ing was not dishonourable if not discovered. I do not commend a society where there is an agreement that what would not otherwise be fair shall be fair; but I maintain, that an individual of any society who practises what is allowed is not a dishonest man. Boswell, So, then, sir, you do not think ill of a man who wins, perhaps, forty thousand pounds in a winter? Johnson, Sir, I do not call a gamester a dishonest man; but I call him an unsocial man, an unprofitable man. Gaming is a mode of transferring property without producing any intermediate good. Trade gives employment to numbers, and so produces intermediate good.

THE CORRECTION OF CHILDREN.

Correction, in itself, is not cruel; children, being not reasonable, can be governed only by fear. To impress this fear, is therefore one of the first duties of those who have the care of children. It is the duty of a parent, and has never been thought inconsistent with parental tenderness. It is the duty of a master, who is in his highest exaltation when he is loco parentis. Yet, as good things become evil by excess, cor

rection, by being immoderate, may become cruel. But when is correction immoderate? When it is more frequent or more severe than is required ad monendum et docendum, for reformation and instruction. No severity is cruel which obstinacy makes necessary; for the greatest cruelty would be to desist, and leave the scholar too careless for instruction, and too much hardened for reproof. Locke, in his treatise on Education, mentions a mother, with applause, who whipped an infant eight times before she had subdued it; for had she stopped at the seventh act of correction, her daughter, says he, would have been ruined. The degrees of obstinacy in young minds are very different: as different must be the degrees of persevering severity.

EMIGRATION.

To a man of mere animal life you can urge no argument against going to America, but that it will be sometime before he will get the earth to produce. But a man of any intellectual enjoyment will not easily go and immerse himself and posterity for ages in barbarism.

CHANGES OF MANNERS.

I remember when all the decent people in Lichfield got drunk every night, and were not the worse thought of. Ale was cheap, so you pressed strongly. When a man must bring a bottle of wine, he is not in such haste. Smoking has gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself: beating with his feet, or so. I remember when people in England changed a shirt only once a week; a Pandour, when he gets a shirt, greases it to make it last. Formerly good tradesmen had no fire but in the kitchen; never in the parlour, except on Sunday. My father, who was a magistrate of Lichfield, lived thus. They never began to have a fire in the parlour but on leaving off business, or some great revolution of their life.

POLITENESS.

It supplies the

It is fictitious benevolence. place of it amongst those who see each other only in public, or but little. Depend upon it, the want of it never fails to produce something disagreeable to one or another. I have always applied to good breeding what Addison, in his "Cato," says of honour :

"Honour's a sacred tie: the law of kings; The noble mind's distinguishing perfection, That aids and strengthens virtue where it meets her,

And imitates her actions where she is not."

Swift is clear, but he is shallow. In coarse humour, he is inferior to Arbuthnot; in delicate humour, he is inferior to Addison; so he is inferior to his contemporaries without putting him against the whole world. I doubt if the "Tale of a Tub" was his; it has so much more thinking, more knowledge, more power, more colour than any of the works which are indisputably his. If it was his, I shall only say he was impar sibi.