tell you, that they have found, to their astonishment, that the care of preserving property was as painful as the anxiety of procuring it, and that to possess was not to enjoy. They will tell you, that they have found innumerable pleasures which wealth did not assist them to enjoy, many which it strangely interrupted, and a few from which it had completely excluded them. Recollect, too, my friends, that this person, whom we have now allowed to choose his situation in life, has chosen it for life. He is to be a rich man, a rich man only, and a rich man forever. Infallible disposer of your own lot! you shall be allowed another trial.

Your ruling passion, then, is fame. Let my life, you say, be short, if it be but brilliant. I will live, though but for an hour here, yet will I live in the admiration of posterity; though seen, and gazed at but for a little time by my cotemporaries, I shall return, like a comet, in the revolutions of centuries, to be the wonder of a remote generation. Riches, I disdain, for they are accessible to any man; health, I am proud to sacrifice; power, I value not, except as it belongs to mind; station, in the common interested grades of society, I am ashamed to aspire to; mind is my kingdom; obscurity only is my dread; to be unknown, is what alone can make me miserable. A life may be celebrated even because it is short. Let me float, though it be but a day, a beautiful meteor on the breath of popularity. I have chosen my lot in life. Grant

my wish, and I am happy. Vain man! it is granted. You are envied, depreciated, sacrificed. Pale, with the laurels round your brow, you have succeeded; but success cannot restore the color of health, which the anxiety of being applauded, has worn away from your cheek. Your temper, too, is ruined; you have become unnaturally sensitive to every word or look which threatens you with censure; painfully jealous of those whom you ought to love; insensible of the clearest worth of your competitors; consumed with a feverish thirst for admiration, or swollen with a solitary pride, which shuts you out from half the pleasures of sympathy, and from half the joys of benevolence. This world, then, is no longer agreeable than while it praises you; therefore you make friends with the next generation, which shall neither love nor hate, neither flatter nor betray you. This, then, is the portion you have chosen; to be applauded, instead of being loved, to be proud, instead of being happy, and you are rewarded by the unsubstantial honors in the gift of posterity, instead of the personal attachment of the generation in which you live. Do not say, my young friend, that I have deserted my first supposition, and that all this wretchedness is the attendant, not of fame attained, but of fame anxiously desired. The objection would be satisfactory if the love of fame were a passion which could be quenched by the attainment of its objects. No, its appetite grows by what it feeds on.

It would be superfluous to mention more of cases, which are so easily imagined. It is plain that if we were allowed to choose our future lot, we should all prefer some change from our present situation. This man would put himself forward a step in the ranks of society, and that would grasp at a little more power; one would seek, as we have supposed, for fame, another for wealth; some would choose uninterrupted health, and its attendant activity; others would prefer inactivity, quietness, security, and ease. But how is it that all these sagacious arbiters of their own destiny have failed in the attainment of a common object? How is it, my friends, that if left to ourselves, we should consult our own happiness less than it is already consulted by the uncertainties, the disappointments, the casualties of the present arrangement of human affairs? The reason is simply this; that happiness does not consist in external circumstances. Of course, arrange your situation in life as you please; surround yourself with wealth, power, influence, fame; still, if you bring not with you the temper most proper for your situation, you have lost, rather than gained, by the privilege you have exercised. Such is the wisdom of God's providence, that the temper most proper for every situation, can be formed only by feeling the very uncertainty on which that situation is granted.

I cannot leave this division of my subject, without indulging some further speculations, on the

wisdom of these apparently uncertain arrangements of Providence.

However paradoxical it may appear, I will venture to assert, that if the formation of our moral characters depended less than it now does upon unforeseen circumstances, in other words, if the virtues which men sometimes exhibit, were placed more easily within their own power, we should probably be not only less happy, but even less virtuous than we now are. It is not too bold to suggest that even a man under the influence of a pure moral principle, and aspiring after eminent attainments in goodness, if left to choose his own character, would neither consult his own true worth, nor his best happiness. We should see him carried away with false estimates of particular excellences.

One man, transported with lofty notions of patriotism, or glowing with the flame of universal benevolence, to attain the moral reputation he most desired, would bend all the powers of his mind, and accommodate all the affections of his heart, to exhibit a character like Washington's or Howard's. Yet this man, though burning with a pure ambition of excellence, being unable to conceive completely, what constitutes the perfection of this or that virtue, and not placed in precisely the situation of his model, would find himself ridiculous at the very summit of his attainments. He would find, that in his wild pursuit of these splendid virtues, his private and particular affections had suffered. He would find, that what he had gained in universal

philanthropy, he had lost in individual sympathy, and you would probably discern that he was a less affectionate son, a less careful parent, a less useful private citizen. If patriotism or universal benevolence were to become his passion, you would find him sacrificing the great laws of mutual justice, to the imagined interests of his own country, or of the world at large; and his moral sense, which was once a nice test of right and wrong in human actions, would be destroyed by too great familiarity with the maxims of national policy, or with the speculations of universal benevolence. Thus we may venture to predict, that this man, when arrived at the summit of the excellence he most earnestly sought, would in fact be a man of less moral worth, than if his character had been left to be formed by the plastic power of the common situations, uncertainties, disappointments, and casualties of life.

I will suppose another case, in which a man shall be permitted to choose his own character. It is that of one impressed with a deep sense of the importance of religious opinions. He looks around on the world, and his heart aches, when he views the creatures of God perishing in ignorance of what, he thinks, can alone constitute their felicity. He glows with a zeal which to him appears the purest of human passions.

If he were to choose the character he would exhibit to the world, it would be that of a man passionately devoted to the progress of religious opin