I trust it is not necessary to do either. While we are yet young, and the passions, powers, and feelings, in their full activity, create to us a world within, we cannot look fairly on the world without:--all things then are good. When first we throw ourselves forth, and meet burs and briars on every side, which stick in our very hearts;--and fair tempting fruits which turn to bitter ashes in the taste, then we exclaim with impatience, all things are evil. But at length comes the calm hour, when they who look beyond the superficies of things begin to discern their true bearings; when the perception of evil, or sorrow, or sin, brings also the perception of some opposite good, which awakens our indulgence, or the knowledge of the cause which excites our pity. Thus it is with me. I can smile,--nay, I can laugh still, to see folly, vanity, absurdity, meanness, exposed by scornful wit, and depicted by others in fictions light and brilliant. But these very things, when I encounter the reality, rather make me sad than merry, and take away all the inclination, if I had the power, to hold them up to derision. MEDON. Unless, by doing so, you might correct them. ALDA. Correct them! Show me that one human being who has been made essentially better by satire! O no, no! there is something in human nature which hardens itself against the lash--something in satire which excites only the lowest and worst of our propensities. That avowal in Pope-- I must be proud to see Men not afraid of God, afraid of me! --has ever filled me with terror and pity-- MEDON. From its truth perhaps? ALDA. From its arrogance,--for the truth is, that a vice never corrected a vice. Pope might be proud of the terror he inspired in those who feared no God in whom vanity was stronger than conscience: but that terror made no individual man better; and while he indulged his own besetting sin, he administered to the malignity of others. Your professed satirists always send me to think upon the opposite sentiment in Shakspeare, on "the mischievous foul sin of chiding sin." I remember once hearing a poem of Barry Cornwall's, (he read it to me,) about a strange winged creature that, having the lineaments of a man, yet preyed on a man, and afterwards coming to a stream to drink, and beholding his own face therein, and that he had made his prey of a creature like himself, pined away with repentance. So should those do, who having made themselves mischievous mirth out of the sins and sorrows of others, remembering their own humanity, and seeing within themselves the same lineaments--so should _they_ grieve and pine away, self-punished. MEDON. 'Tis an old allegory, and a sad one--and but too much to the purpose. ALDA.