n should be involved in Gloom and Melancholy.

I the more inculcate this Chearfulness of Temper, as it is a Virtue in
which our Countrymen are observed to be more deficient than any other
Nation. Melancholy is a kind of Demon that haunts our Island, and often
conveys her self to us in an Easterly Wind. A celebrated French
Novelist, in opposition to those who begin their Romances with the
flow'ry Season of the Year, enters on his Story thus: In the gloomy
Month of November, when the People of England hang and drown themselves,
a disconsolate Lover walked out into the Fields, &c.

Every one ought to fence against the Temper of his Climate or
Constitution, and frequently to indulge in himself those Considerations
which may give him a Serenity of Mind, and enable him to bear up
chearfully against those little Evils and Misfortunes which are common
to humane Nature, and which by a right Improvement of them will produce
a Satiety of Joy, and an uninterrupted Happiness.

At the same time that I would engage my Reader to consider the World in
its most agreeable Lights, I must own there are many Evils which
naturally spring up amidst the Entertainments that are provided for us;
but these, if rightly consider'd, should be far from overcasting the
Mind with Sorrow, or destroying that Chearfulness of Temper which I have
been recommending. This Interspersion of Evil with Good, and Pain with
Pleasure, in the Works of Nature, is very truly ascribed by Mr. Locke,
in his Essay on Human Understanding, to a moral Reason, in the following
Words:

Beyond all this, we may find another Reason why God hath scattered up
and down several Degrees of Pleasure and Pain, in all the things that
environ and affect us, and blended them together, in almost all that
our Thoughts and Senses have to do with; that we finding Imperfection,
Dissatisfaction, and Want of compleat Happiness in all the Enjoyments
which the Creatures can afford us, might be led to seek it in the
Enjoyment of him, with whom there is Fulness of Joy, and at whose
Right Hand are Pleasures for evermore.

L.

[Footnote 1: Numbered by mistake, in the daily issue 388, No. 388 is
then numbered 390; 389 is right, 390 is called 392, the next 391, which
is right, another 392 follows, and thus the error is corrected.]

[Footnote 2: Sir Isaac Newton.]

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No. 388. Monday, May 26, 1712.