dernise Chaucer, and Spenser, and other
authors, whose style was supposed to have grown obsolete. But true taste
cannot endure the impious mockery. The very words that occurred to these
men, when the God descended, and a fire from heaven tingled in all their
veins, are sacred, are part of themselves; and you may as well attempt
to preserve the man when you have deprived him of all his members, as
think to preserve the poet when you have taken away the words that he
spoke. No part of his glorious effusions must perish; and "the hairs of
his head are all numbered."

ESSAY XI. OF SELF-LOVE AND BENEVOLENCE.

NO question has more memorably exercised the ingenuity of men who
have speculated upon the structure of the human mind, than that of
the motives by which we are actuated in our intercourse with our
fellow-creatures. The dictates of a plain and unsophisticated
understanding on the subject are manifest; and they have been asserted
in the broadest way by the authors of religion, the reformers of
mankind, and all persons who have been penetrated with zeal and
enthusiasm for the true interests of the race to which they belong.

"The end of the commandment," say the authors of the New Testament, "is
love." "This is the great commandment of the law, Thou shalt love thy
maker with all thy heart; and the second is like unto it, Thou shalt
love thy neighbour as thyself." "Though I bestow all my goods to feed
the poor, and give my body to be burned, and have not love, it profiteth
me nothing." "For none of us liveth to himself; and no man dieth to
himself."

The sentiments of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for so many centuries
as their institutions retained their original purity, were cast in a
mould of a similar nature. A Spartan was seldom alone; they were always
in society with each other. The love of their country and of the public
good was their predominant passion, they did not imagine that they
belonged to themselves, but to the state. After the battle of Leuctra,
in which the Spartans were defeated by the Thebans, the mothers of those
who were slain congratulated one another, and went to the temples to
thank the Gods, that their children had done their duty; while the
relations of those who survived the defeat were inconsolable.

The Romans were not less distinguished by their self-denying patriotism.
It was in this spirit that Brutus put his two sons to death for
conspiring against their country. It was in thi