onizing throbs;
And, after proper purpose of amendment,
Can firmly force his jarring thoughts to peace?
O, happy! happy! enviable man!
O glorious magnanimity of soul!

* * * * *

_March_, 1784.

I have often observed, in the course of my experience of human life,
that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though
very often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution
inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason no man can say
in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be, with strict
justice, called wicked. Let any, of the strictest character for
regularity of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he
has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want
of opportunity, or some accidental circumstance intervening; how many
of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the
line of such temptation; and, what often, if not always, weighs more
than all the rest, how much he is indebted to the world's good
opinion, because the world does not know all: I say, any man who can
thus think, will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of
mankind around him, with a brother's eye.

I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind,
commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes
farther than was consistent with the safety of my character; those who
by thoughtless prodigality or headstrong passions, have been driven to
ruin. Though disgraced by follies, nay sometimes, stained with guilt,
I have yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the
noblest virtues, magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship,
and even modesty.

* * * * *

_April._

As I am what the men of the world, if they knew such a man, would call
a whimsical mortal, I have various sources of pleasure and enjoyment,
which are, in a manner, peculiar to myself, or some here and there
such other out-of-the-way person. Such is the peculiar pleasure I take
in the season of winter, more than the rest of the year. This, I
believe, may be partly owing to my misfortunes giving my mind a
melancholy cast: but there is something even in the--

"Mighty tempest, and the hoary waste
Abrupt and deep, stretch'd o'er the buried earth,"--

which raises the mind to a serious sublimity, favourable to everything
great and noble. There is scarce