tion, form, and magnitude--the animal,
vegetable, and mineral kingdoms--have their several sciences, and
each would exhaust a life to master it completely. No uneasy
passion follows him who engages in such speculations, where
continual pursuit is made happy by the sense of continual
progress. He leaves his cares at the threshold; for when his
attention is fixed, so great is the pleasure of contemplation,
that it seems good to have been born for this alone.

"If we turn to the moral world, where, strange as it seems, we
meet with less clearness and grandeur, yet there our deep
interest in its truths supplies a different, perhaps a more
powerful attraction. While we wonder and hope, the general laws
of sentient existence give us glimpses of their harmony with
those of inanimate nature. The latter seems assuredly made for
the use of the former. The identity of benevolence with wisdom
presents itself to our minds as a necessary truth, and,
notwithstanding our perplexities, brings peace to our hearts.
Social distinctions sink to insignificance when contemplating our
place in existence, and the privilege of reading the book of
nature, and sharing the thoughts and the sentiments of the
distinguished among men, atones for obscurity and neglect;
neither would the troubled power of a throne nor the flushing of
victory repay us for the sacrifice of those pleasures."

The second volume opens with a dissertation on luxury, in which the
subject is treated with the depth and perspicuity that the extracts we
have already made will have prepared our readers to anticipate. Luxury is
a word of relative, and therefore of ambiguous signification; it may be
the test of prosperity--it may be the harbinger of decay: according to the
state of society in which it prevails, its signification will, of course,
be different. The effect of civilization is to increase the number of our
wants. The same degree of education which, during the last century, was
considered, even by the upper classes, a superfluity, is now a necessary
for the middling class, and will soon become a necessary for the lowest,
or all but the lowest, members of society. Most of our readers are
acquainted with the story of the Highland chief who rebuked his son
indignantly for making a pillow of a snowball. Sumptuary laws have always
been inefficient, or efficient only for the purposes of oppr