e mutually at good weather, as at an escape from something that we
feared; and mutually complain of bad, as of the loss of something that
we hoped.

Such is the reason of our practice; and who shall treat it with
contempt? Surely not the attendant on a court, whose business is to
watch the looks of a being weak and foolish as himself, and whose vanity
is to recount the names of men, who might drop into nothing, and leave
no vacuity; nor the proprietor of funds, who stops his acquaintance in
the street to tell him of the loss of half-a-crown; nor the inquirer
after news, who fills his head with foreign events, and talks of
skirmishes and sieges, of which no consequence will ever reach his
hearers or himself. The weather is a nobler and more interesting
subject; it is the present state of the skies, and of the earth, on
which plenty and famine are suspended, on which millions depend for the
necessaries of life.

The weather is frequently mentioned for another reason, less honourable
to my dear countrymen. Our dispositions too frequently change with the
colour of the sky; and when we find ourselves cheerful and good-natured,
we naturally pay our acknowledgments to the powers of sunshine; or, if
we sink into dulness and peevishness, look round the horizon for an
excuse, and charge our discontent upon an easterly wind or a cloudy day.

Surely nothing is more reproachful to a being endowed with reason, than
to resign its powers to the influence of the air, and live in dependence
on the weather and the wind, for the only blessings which nature has put
into our power, tranquillity and benevolence. To look up to the sky for
the nutriment of our bodies, is the condition of nature; to call upon
the sun for peace and gaiety, or deprecate the clouds lest sorrow should
overwhelm us, is the cowardice of idleness, and the idolatry of folly.

Yet even in this age of inquiry and knowledge, when superstition is
driven away, and omens and prodigies have lost their terrours, we find
this folly countenanced by frequent examples. Those that laugh at the
portentous glare of a comet, and hear a crow with equal tranquillity
from the right or left, will yet talk of times and situations proper for
intellectual performances, will imagine the fancy exalted by vernal
breezes, and the reason invigorated by a bright calm.

If men who have given up themselves to fanciful credulity would confine
their conceits in their own minds, they might regulate