The tanner who lives among his hides till he is insensible to their exhalations--the surgeon who has conquered the disgust with which the objects around him must fill an ordinary individual--the sensualist, on whose jaded appetite all the resources of art and all the loveliness of nature are employed in vain--may serve as common instances of the first part of the proposition; and the astonishing facility acquired by particular men in the business with which they are conversant, are proofs no less irrefragable of the second. Can any argument be conceived which is more decisive in favour of the moral economy to which even this lower world is subject, than the undeniable fact, that virtue is fortified by exercise, and pain conquered by endurance; while vice, like the bearer of the sibyl's books, extorts every hour a greater sacrifice for less enjoyment? The passage in Mammon's speech is no less philosophically accurate than it is poetically beautiful-- "Out torments also may in length of time Become our elements, these piercing fires As soft as now severe, our temper changed Into their temper, which must needs remove The sensible of pain." So does man pass on his way, from youth to manhood, from manhood till the shadow of death falls upon him; and while his moral and physical structure adapts itself to the incessant vicissitudes of his being, he imagines himself the same. The same in sunshine and in tempest--in the temperate and the torrid zone--in sickness and in health--in joy and sorrow--at school and in the camp or senate--still, still he is the same. His passions change, his pleasures alter; what once filled him with rapture, is now indifferent, it may be loathsome. The friends of his youth are his friends no longer--other faces are around him--other voices echo in his ears. Still he is the same--the same, when chilling experience has taught him its bitter lesson, and when life in all its glowing freshness first dawned upon his view. The same, when "vanity of vanities" is graven upon his heart--as when his youthful fancy revelled in scenes of love, of friendship, and of renown. The same, when cold, cautious, interested, suspicious, guilty--as when daring, reckless, frank, confiding, innocent. Still the dream continues, still the vision lasts, until some warning yet unknown--the tortures of disease, or the loss of the very object round which his heartstrings were entwined, anguish within, and desolation without--stir him into consciousness, and remind him of that fast approaching change which no illusion can conceal. Such is the pliability of our nature, so varied are the modes of our being; and thus, through the benevolence of Him who made us, the cause which renders our keenest pleasures transient, makes pain less acute, and death less terrible.