tolerable modern rhymer, of which he is now no bad emblem; and if our fine ladies would use equal diligence, they might fashion their minds as successfully as Madam Catherina distorts her body.

There is not in the world a more useless idle ani. mal, than he who contents himself with being merely a gentleman. He has an estate, therefore he will not endeavour to acquire knowledge: he is not to labour in any vocation, therefore he will do nothing. But the misfortune is, that there is no such thing in nature as negative virtue, and that absolute idleness is impracticable. He who does no good, will certainly do mischief; and the mind, if it is not stored with useful knowledge, will necessarily become a magazine of nonsense and trifles. Wherefore a gentleman, though he is not obliged to rise to open his shop, or work at his trade, should always find some way of employing his time to advantage. If he makes no advances in wisdom, he will become more and more a slave to folly; and he that does nothing, because he has nothing to do, will become vicious and abandoned, or at least ridiculous and contemptible.

I do not know a more melancholy object than a man of an honest heart and fine natural abilities, whose good qualities are thus destroyed by Indolence. Such a person is a constant plague to all his friends and acquaintance, with all the means in his power of adding to their happiness; and suffers himself to rank among the lowest characters, when he might render himself conspicuous among the highest. Nobody is more universally beloved, and more universally avoided than my friend Careless. He is a humane man, who never did a beneficent action; and a man of unshaken integrity, on whom it is impossible to depend. With the best head and the best heart, he regulates his conduct in the most absurd manner, and frequently injures his

friends; for, whoever neglects to do justice to himself, must inevitably wrong those with whom he is connected; and it is by no means a true maxim, That an idle man hurts nobody but himself.

Virtue then is not to be considered in the light of mere innocence, or abstaining from harm; but as the exertion of our faculties in doing good as Titus, when he had let a day slip undistinguished by some act of virtue, cried out, I have lost a day.' If we regard our time in this light, how many days shall we look back upon as irretrievably lost? and to how narrow a compass would such a method of calculation frequently reduce the longest life? If we were to number our days according as we have applied them to virtue, it would occasion strange revolutions in the manner of reckoning the ages of men. We should see some few arrived to a good old age in the prime of their youth, and meet with several young fellows of fourscore.

Agreeable to this way of thinking, I remember to have met with the epitaph of an aged man, four years old, dating his existence from the time of his reformation from evil courses. The inscriptions on most tomb-stones commemorate no acts of virtue performed by the persons who lie under them, but only record, that they were born one day and died another. But I would fain have those people, whose lives have been useless, rendered of some service after their deaths, by affording lessons of instruction and morality to those they leave behind them. Wherefore I could wish, that in every parish several acres were marked out for a new and spacious burying-ground, in which every person, whose remains are there deposited, should have a small stone laid over them, reckoning their age according to the manner in which they have improved or abused the time allotted them in their lives. In such circumstances, the plate on a coffin might be the

highest panegyric which the deceased could receive; and a little square stone inscribed with Ob. Ann. Etat. 80. would be a nobler eulogium than all the lapidary adulation of modern epitaphs. In a burying ground of this nature, allowing for the partiality of survivors, which would certainly point out the most brilliant actions of their dead friends, we might perhaps see some inscriptions, not much unlike the following:

6

• Here lie the remains of a celebrated beauty, aged fifty, who died in her fiftieth year. She was born in her eighteenth year, and was untimely killed by the small-pox in her twenty-third.'

'Here rests in eternal sleep, the mortal part of L. B. a free-thinker, aged eighty-eight, an infant. He came into the world by chance, in the year and was annihilated in the first year of his age.'

'Here continue to rot, the bones of a noted Buck, an embryo, which never shewed any signs of life; but after twenty-three years was so totally putrified, that it could not be kept above ground any longer.'

Here lies the swoln carcase of a Boon Companion, who was born in a dropsy in his fortieth year. He lingered in this condition till he was obliged to be tapped; when he relapsed into his former condition, and died in the second year of his age, and twenty-third of his drinking.'

Here lies Isaac Da Costa, a convert from Judaism, aged sixty-four. He was born and christened in his sixty-first year, and died in the true Faith in the third year of his age.'

Here is deposited the body of the celebrated Beau Tawdry, who was born at court in the year on a birth-night, and died of grief in the se cond year, upon the court's going into mourning.

0.

No. CXXXII. THURSDAY, AUGUST 5.

Odi profanum Vulgus et arceo.

HOR.

I hate the Vulgar; nor will condescend

To call a foul-mouth'd handicraftsman Friend.

I KNOW not any greater misfortune that can happen to a young fellow, at his first setting out in life, than his falling into low company. He that' sinks to a familiarity with persons much below his own level, will be constantly weighed down by his base connexions; and though he may easily plunge still lower, he will find it almost impossible ever to rise again. He will also inevitably contract a mean air, and an illiberal disposition; and you can no more give him an ingenious turn of mind, by a sudden introduction to genteel company, than you can make an apprentice a fine gentleman, by dressing him in embroidery though experience teaches us, that the mind is, unhappily, sooner distorted than reformed; and a gentleman will as readily catch the manners of the vulgar, by mixing with such mean associates, as he would daub his clothes with soot by running against a chimney-sweeper.

A propensity to low company is owing either to an original meanness of spirit, a want of education, or an ill-placed pride, commonly arising from both the fore-mentioned causes, Those who are natu rally of a grovelling disposition, shew it even at school, by chusing their play-fellows from the scum of the class; and are never so happy as when they can steal down to romp with the servants in the kitchen. They have no emulation in them: they entertain none of that decent pride which is so essential a requisite in all characters: and the total absence of which, in a boy, is a certain indication

that his riper age will be contemptible. I remember a young fellow of this cast, who, by his early attachment to low company, gave up all the advantages of a good family and ample fortune. He not

only lost all his natural interest in the country, where his estate was situated, but was not honoured with the acquaintance of one gentleman in it. He lived, indeed, chiefly in town, and at an expence sufficient to have maintained him amongst those of the first rank; but he was so perpetually surrounded with men of the lowest character, that people of fashion, or even those of a much inferior fortune, would have thought it infamous to be seen with him. All the while he was reckoned by his associates to be a mighty good natured gentleman, and without the least bit of pride in him.

It is one of the greatest advantages of education, that it encourages an ingenious spirit, and cultivates a liberal disposition. We do not wonder that a lad who has never been sent to school, and whose faculties have been suffered to rust at the hall-house, should form too close an intimacy with his best friends, the groom and the game-keeper; but it would amaze us to see a boy well educated, cherish this ill-placed pride of being, as it is called, the head of the company. A person of this humble ambition will be very well content to pay the reckoning, for the honour of being distinguished by the title of The Gentleman; while he is unwilling to associate with men of fashion, lest they should be his superiors in rank or fortune or with men of parts, lest they should excel him in abilities. Sometimes, indeed, it happens that a person of genius and learning will stoop to receive the incense of mean and illiterate flatterers in a porter-house or cyder-cellar; and I remember to have heard of a poet, who was once caught in a brothel in the very fact of reading