plete with examples of sudden elevations and sudden downfalls in the lives of particular persons, that I have forborne to introduce any instances in aid of my observations. Besides which, the riotous sports of fortune in a neighbouring kingdom have afforded such a train of unprecedented revolutions, as beggars all former experience. The vulgar details of the day are full of lessons on the instability of greatness, and the vanity of ambition; the very elements of civilization have been destroyed in a moment, and society itself disbanded. In the general agitation and tumult, the very mud of the community has been excited from the bottom of the pool, which no longer reflects from its surface the human face divine, but exhibits a dark and melancholy abyss, in which nothing is traceable, nothing distinct; nothing but a squalid commixture of human woes and depravities. At this moment, how many testimonies to the instability of grandeur are spread over this part of the globe! How many are wandering without homes, whose homes were principali. ties; and how many have exchanged their palaces for prisons! How humiliating are these lessons to the pride of human nature! But a little while ago our shores were visited by a mendicant general, supplicating an asylum in that country whose establishments he had menaced with certain overthrow, whose prosperity he had viewed with derision, and whose fair and flourishing land in his heart he had vowed to destruction.

Such catastrophes instruct us in the littleness of our pride and pretensions, and show us the folly of all those hopes which depend upon man for their accomplishment. They are greater, indeed, than such as fall within the experience of ordinary men, and more awful by their magnitude; but they are only

the same on a greater scale with those constant miscarriages in lower life, with which every attempt is accompanied, that is not founded on principles of prudence and probity, and makes no provision for those perpetual shocks and vicissitudes which place disappointment and disaster among the moral cer

tainties of life.

No. 66. SATURDAY, AUGUST 17.

Satis est, mi Tiberi, si hoc habemus ne quis nobis male facere possit.

SUETON. IN AUG.

Let them say what they please, Tiberius; it is enough revenge for us, that we are out of the reach of their malice.

THE reader may naturally wonder, that, considering the prevalence of scandal in the world, it has not drawn upon itself, before this time, the attention of the LOOKer-on. The truth is, that, like a cautious physician, I am not fond of being called in upon desperate occasions; and I really regard the propensity to slander and detraction as one of the most incurable diseases to which the mind of man is subject. It seems hardly to undergo the common fluctuations which we may observe in the course of other vices. In all ages and all nations it has been triumphantly mischievous; and from Hesiod to Addison, every moral writer has complained of it, as the prevailing infirmity of his times. The gigantic growth, ascendancy, and universality of this evil, arise from the extraordinary nourishment it receives

from all the bad propensities of our nature: there is no passion but what lends to it some assistance; and the sources which contribute to sustain it are so various and inexhaustible, that, before it can be subdued in the mind, a thousand collateral supports must be destroyed.

I have observed too, that it is the retreat of disappointed passion; and that, when our hopes and ambitions are defeated, they not seldom fall upon this mode of reparation. As soon as our schemes of aggrandisement fail, we rarely perplex ourselves for a moment with inquiring into the grounds on which they stood; but, by scattering a promiscuous abuse on all around us, endeavour to save our own credit at the expense of the public judgement or public probity. We forget, however, that mankind are, after all, to be our judges, and that by these measures we are in fact denouncing those to whom we are making our appeal. It is a truth which we are long in being taught, that the world is very independent of every individual, while no individual is independent of the world; and that, if one man be rejected by the rest, he can have no revenge in attacking the whole. After all our spleen and all our resentment, the world will still continue to suppose itself right, and will not be cudgelled into approba tion.

It is somewhat curious to observe the uniform appearance under which this vice has shown itself in all ages, and how nearly the different descriptions of it, which the poets and moralists of all times have left us, do coincide in the circumstances under which they represent it. Lucian has left us a kind of sermon upon scandal, which is as suitable to the complexion of the present times as it was to that of his

own;

and the Thersites of Homer may be found in every village in England. The blacksmiths' and barbers' shops in Greece and in Rome were always, as they are at this day in country towns, the resorts of idle folks and gossiping tale-bearers. Thus Aristophanes, in his Plutus:

"I would not credit it, if it were the common talk of all the lounging fellows in the barbers' shops."

The Greeks, whose language affords us a name fenixasρexanía) for this cruel delight in the misfortunes of others, had certainly so strong a propensity to gossiping, that nothing but their constant occupation in their wars would have prevented their becoming the veriest prattlers under heaven: and this seems to have been eminently the character of all those who were settled in peaceful situations at Rome under the emperors. As their affairs declined, and their ardour in the cause of liberty no longer engaged them in continual warfare, this prominent part of their character began to develope itself, and increased to such a degree, that at length they talked themselves out of all their dignity, and much of their philosophy. The following verse in the Acts of the Apostles bears testimony to the truth of this remark

"For all the Athenians and strangers which were there, spent their time in nothing else, but either to hear or tell some new thing." Of how many of my countrymen does this at present constitute the only classical accomplishment!

It gives me pain to observe, that in ancient as well as modern times, the reproach of this gossiping mania

has principally fallen upon the women, whose natural bias towards tenderness and mercy would make this a very unaccountable particularity, unless we looked for the cause of it in the narrower compass of their education, and the more circumscribed range of their lives and employments. The love of scandal is generally in proportion to the deficiency of other topics; and as in some countries it has been the fashion to starve the minds of the females, in all to abridge them of the necessary nourishment, we are not to wonder at their resorting to these supplements and succedaneums.

Whether it be true or not of nature, it is clear enough that the mind abhors a vacuum, and, if it be not supplied with better matter for contemplation, it will fill up its measure of thinking with the homely topics of the day, or the vulgar gossip of idle curiosity. We shall find it every where through life the same: the mind of man has an unwearied activity, that keeps it in perpetual motion: if we stop its progress in one place, it will burst out in another; and if we bar its access to things it will of necessity fall upon persons. For the same reason, wherever there is the greatest dearth of popular information, there will always be the greatest tendency to this odious habit; and in proportion as a place is small, and insulated from general communication; in proportion as, by its situation, it is dependent on its own internal harmony for its happiness and its amusement, it manifests a disposition to abuse and calumny.

I hope I shall not experience the displeasure of the ladies for what I have said of their propensity to scandal, in which I have produced a cause that vindicates the constitution of their minds, and throws the whole blame upon the circumstances in which they are placed. If, however, the general accusa