N° 62. SATURDAY, JULY 20. Manus manum fricat. Give ME that warmth which hands impart, The fire that's borrow'd from above, And only heaven-taught bosoms prove. In an age and in a country wherein the tones of every thing are stretched to their utmost, and in which the thirst of refinement has carried our virtues to the very confines of vice, it is an useful service to distin guish between the just measure and the excess, the pretended and the real, the solid and the superficial. There is a period in the progress of society, when virtues and vices seem to draw towards each other! with a mutual approach; a period in which a certain delicacy of appetite, and fastidiousness of feeling, shapes our vicious indulgences to something like a virtuous elegance, and overstrains our virtues to so unnatural a pitch, as to destroy their efficacy, and distort their appearance. The noble pre-eminence to which this country has raised itself in the present crisis, by a catholic spirit of charity, which no enmities, no hostilities, no national difficulties can repress, should, methinks, make us the more solicitous to preserve this lustre of character from the tarnish of osten-¿ tatious and hypocritical sensibility. Nothing has a greater tendency to lower the price of real virtues, than the progress of these imitations. When it is found that the boast succeeds as well as the practice, and that loud and loquacious feeling raises our credit higher than the quiet tenour of good actions, the imbecility of our minds is overcome by this union of ease and splendour, and we are content to take the honour without its pains and sacrifices. It is the lot of some impostors to impose upon themselves, while they think they are only deceiving the world; and, by continual professions and boasts of sensibility, the mind comes at last to believe them itself, erects to itself a secret shrine, and is the idol of its own contemplations. Even in the best constituted minds the smallest speck of ostentation is a dangerous blemish; it steals on with an insensible enlargement, till it stretches to the whole circumference, and admits only a troubled and deceiving glare, while it shuts out the distinct and definite objects of genuine compassion. We are come to those times in which it is necessary almost to set as strong a guard upon our virtues as upon our vices; since it is the tendency of great refinement to draw out the one to an excess and extravagance, that destroys its practicability, while it operates as a check to the other, and mitigates its violence. Besides which, there is in the high polish of general manners, an effect, which, in some measure confounds the distinctions of virtue and vice, and, by giving an uniform universal brilliancy to our actions and deportment, requires a very close observation to distinguish the different shades and colourings of characters. But, besides the distinctions between true and false sensibility, there is a very material difference in the nature of sensibility itself. There is a sensibility which is bounded to our own interests and concerns; and there is a sensibility which embraces all that appertains to man- -which makes the cause of misery its own, dissolves with a stranger's woe, and drops tear for tear with the sorrowful and broken-hearted. Again, we may divide into two separate classes, those sensible hearts that feel unfeignedly for the woes of others, and interest themselves tenderly in all that concerns the happiness of their fellow-creatures; för there are who sympathise with every tale of distress, who love to dwell on topics of sorrow, and whose tears drop fast at a tale of affliction, but whose pity is only in speculation, and who make but few sacrifices for the woes they lament; and there are others again whose tears are few or many, and whose apparent commiseration is either much or little, but whose actions invariably point to objects of kindness and humanity, and whose hands accompany their hearts in every concern of benevolence or pity. Let such as come under this latter description enjoy exclusively their just though silent claims; let them not be confounded with fraudulent pretenders, who ravish the rewards without performing the duties; or with such as feel only within the circle of their own interests and connections; or with those barren sentimentalists who refine upon sorrows without relieving them: but let them stand in their due eminence above the common mass of pity's advocates, and let their inheritance of praise be such as rightfully belongs to the eldest children of humanity. After all, however, in our estimation of human actions perhaps it were better not too curiously to examine into their origin and motives; we have little else to do in this world, but with ostensible proofs and results. Whatever it is which keeps a man in the observance of his duty, or in the practice of be nevolence, it is enough for us that the présent purposes of humanity are answered; we shall account at a future tribunal for our secret motives, where all hearts will be laid open, and the depths of human counsels scrutinised and exposed. Among those whose hands are always open to human distresses, and whose actions seem to testify sensibility of soul, there are some, doubtless, whom the love of celebrity alone incites, and in whose bosoms a tacit bargain accompanies every act of generosity, by which they bespeak an equivalent of praise; others, by whose conduct it should seem that they conceive that they purchase a right to sin, by scattering their bounties among the poor, or consecrating their tears to suffering humanity; and some again, whose charities belong to no better motives than a mere mechanical impulse, or a certain bias towards imitation, or an imbecile homage to the fashion of the day. It is fair, however, to pronounce, that the charities of that man are not the fruits of his sensibilities, nor his public assiduities and liberalities the progeny of genuine feeling, when his wife deplores at home his indifference, his unkindness, or his tyranny, or his children bear testimony to the narrowness of his heart, that has induced him to withhold those opportunities and instructions which were requisite to open their minds to their better interests. As the business of life becomes arranged, classified, and systematised in the progress of national refinement, and as inventions and improvements push themselves on all sides, till every thing is reduced to a science, we may observe, that even the virtues themselves are squared into rules, so that the practice of them may be learned by those who have but little of the spirit or essence of them in their hearts. A gentleman becomes a natural philosopher by purchasing a cabinet, and adopting the cant of the London schools; a house filled with paintings, establishes a connoisseur; a man is made a gentleman at the Herald's office much sooner than by the ordinary methods of education; and, not satisfied with manufacturing nobility of blood, we have contrivances for making men charitable, humane, and tender-hearted, without requiring them to possess these qualities in their bosoms: thus we have only to bestow in a certain way a certain sum of money, and exercise ourselves in a certain mode of declamation, to be considered as professors in the science of humanity. My projecting friend, with whose conversation I am seldom favoured, by reason of the multiplicity of business he has always on his hands, passed a day with me a fortnight ago, and was prodigiously struck with my idea of a school of sensibility, accommodated to the present state of fashionable feelings. He sent me, the next day, the following advertisement, intended for the public prints, in which some part of his plan is exhibited. "Grown Ladies and Gentlemen taught Sensibility on Mathematical Principles. "The advertiser hopes for the encouragement of "the public, upon the strength of his long and labo"rious application to this most elegant of all arts, "which he has reduced to a system, that makes it 66 easy to the dullest capacity. The principal ex"cellence of his plan consists in its being universally " applicable, as it requires no particular constitution "of the mind, or habits of life, to qualify a scholar "to arrive at all its advantages. As the advertiser is well aware that different kinds of sensibility be"come different characters and stations in life, he |