a great part of his life under the tortures of the gout or stone; at one time groaning with insufferable anguish, at another dissolved in listlessness and languor. From this general and indiscriminate distribution of misery, the moralists have always derived one of their strongest moral arguments for a future state; for since the common events of the present life happen alike to the good and bad, it follows from the justice of the Supreme Being, that there must be another state of existence, in which a just retribution shall be made, and every man shall be happy and miserable according to his works. The miseries of life may, perhaps, afford some proof of a future state, compared as well with the mercy as the justice of God. It is scarcely to be imagined, that Infinite Benevolence would create a being capable of enjoying so much more than is here to be enjoyed, and qualified by nature to prolong pain by remembrance, and anticipate it by terror, if he was not designed for something nobler and better than a state, in which many of his faculties can serve only for his torment; in which he is to be importuned by desires that never can be satisfied, to feel many evils which he has no power to avoid, and to fear many which he shall never feel: there will surely come a time, when every capacity of happiness shall be filled, and none shall be wretched but by his own fault. In the mean time, it is by affliction chiefly that the heart of man is purified, and that the thoughts are fixed upon a better state. Prosperity, allayed and imperfect as it is, has power to intoxicate the imagination, to fix the mind upon the present scene, to produce confidence and elation, and to make him who enjoys affluence and honours forget the hand by which they were bestowed. It is seldom that we the calumny of defamers, and the violence of oppo nents. Affliction is inseparable from our present state; it adheres to all the inhabitants of this world, in different proportions, indeed, but with an allotment which seems very little regulated by our own conduct. It has been the boast of some swelling moralist, that every man's fortune was in his own power, that prudence supplied the place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue. But surely the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain: we do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected by our inno cence. A good man is by no means exempt from the danger of suffering by the crimes of others; even his goodness may raise him enemies of implacable malice and restless perseverance: the good man has never been warranted by Heaven from the treachery of friends, the disobedience of children, or the dishonesty of a wife; he may see his cares made useless by profusion, his instructions defeated by perverseness, and his kindness rejected by ingratitude; he may languish under the infamy of false accusations, or perish reproachfully by an unjust sentence. A good man is subject, like other mortals, to all the influences of natural evil: his harvest is not spared by the tempest, nor his cattle by the murrain ; his house flames like others in a conflagration; nor have his ships any peculiar power of resisting hurricanes his mind, however elevated, inhabits a body subject to innumerable casualties, of which he must always share the dangers and the pains; he bears about him the seeds of disease, and may linger away a great part of his life under the tortures of the gout or stone; at one time groaning with insufferable anguish, at another dissolved in listlessness and languor. From this general and indiscriminate distribution of misery, the moralists have always derived one of their strongest moral arguments for a future state; for since the common events of the present life happen alike to the good and bad, it follows from the justice of the Supreme Being, that there must be another state of existence, in which a just retribution shall be made, and every man shall be happy and miserable according to his works. The miseries of life may, perhaps, afford some proof of a future state, compared as well with the mercy as the justice of God. It is scarcely to be imagined, that Infinite Benevolence would create a being capable of enjoying so much more than is here to be enjoyed, and qualified by nature to prolong pain by remembrance, and anticipate it by terror, if he was not designed for something nobler and better than a state, in which many of his faculties can serve only for his torment; in which he is to be importuned by desires that never can be satisfied, to feel many evils which he has no power to avoid, and to fear many which he shall never feel: there will surely come a time, when every capacity of happiness shall be filled, and none shall be wretched but by his own fault. In the mean time, it is by affliction chiefly that the heart of man is purified, and that the thoughts are fixed upon a better state. Prosperity, allayed and imperfect as it is, has power to intoxicate the imagination, to fix the mind upon the present scene, to produce confidence and elation, and to make him who enjoys affluence and honours forget the hand by which they were bestowed. It is seldom that we apprehension from the comb or the razor, and foresaw no misfortune, except that our country should be overstocked, and we should be compelled to wander, like the barbarians of the North, in search of another. But it happened that the lord of our soil, in an evil hour, went with some of his companions to Highgate. Just at the top of the hill was a stage and a mountebank, where several feats of wit and humour were performed by a gentleman with a gridiron upon his back, who assisted the doctor in his vocation. We were presently in the midst of the crowd, and soon afterward upon the stage; which the boy was persuaded to ascend, that, by a sudden stroke of conjuration, a great quantity of gold might be conveyed under his hat. Under his hat, however, the dexterous but mischievous operator, having imperceptibly conveyed a rotten egg, clapped his hand smartly upon it, and showed the aurum potabile running down on each side, to the unspeakable delight of the beholders, but to the great disappointment of the boy, and the total ruin of our community. "It is impossible to describe the confusion and distress which this accident instantly produced among us: we were at once buried in a quag, intolerably noisome, and insuperably viscid: those who had been overturned in its passage, found it impossible to recover their situation; and the few who happening to lie near the borders of the suffusion, had with the utmost efforts of their strength crawled to those parts which it had not reached, laboured in vain to free themselves from shackles, which every moment became more strong as the substance which formed them grew more hard, and threatened, in a short time, totally to deprive them of all power of motion. I was myself among this number, and cannot even now recollect my situation without shuddering at my danger. In the mean time, the candidate for enchanted gold, who, in the search of pleasure, had found only dirt and hunger, weariness and disappointment, reflecting that his stolen holiday was at an end, returned forlorn and disconsolate to his nurse. The nose of this good woman was soon offended by an unsavoury smell, and it was not long before she discovered whence it proceeded. A few questions, and a good thump on the back, brought the whole secret to light; and the delinquent, that he might be at once purified and punished, was carried to the next pump, where his head was held under the spout till he had received the discipline of a pickpocket. He was, indeed, very near being drowned; but his sufferings were nothing in comparison of ours. We were overwhelmed with a second inundation; the cataracts, which burst upon us with a noise tenfold more dreadful than thunder, swept us by hundreds before them; and the few that remained would not have had strength to keep their hold against the impetuosity of the torrent, if it had continued a few minutes longer. I was still among those that escaped; and after we had a little recovered from our fright, we found that if we had lost our friends, we were released from the viscous durance which our own strength could never have broken. We were also delivered from the dread of an emigration and a famine; and taking comfort in these reflections, we were enabled to reconcile ourselves, without murmuring, to the fate of those who had perished. "But the series of misfortunes which I have been doomed to suffer, without respite, was now begun. The next day was Holy Thursday; and the stupendous being, who, without labour, carried the ruins of our state in procession to the bounds of his parish, thought fit to break his wand into a cudgel as soon |