That virtue gives happiness we all know; but if it be true that happiness contributes to virtue, the principle furnishes us with some sort of excuse for the errors and excesses of able young man, at the bottom of life, fretting with impatience under their obscurity, and hatching a thousand chimeras of being neglected and overlooked by the world. The natural cure for these errors is the sunshine of prosperity: as they get happier, they get better, and learn, from the respect which they receive from others, to respect themselves. "Whenever," says Mr. Lancaster (in his book just published), "I met with a boy particularly mischievous, I made him a monitor: I never knew this fail." The _cause_ for the promotion, and the kind of encouragement it must occasion, I confess appear rather singular, but of the _effect_, I have no sort of doubt. POWER OF HABIT. Habit uniformly and constantly strengthens all our active exertions: whatever we do often, we become more and more apt to do. A snuff-taker begins with a pinch of snuff per day, and ends with a pound or two every month. Swearing begins in anger; it ends by mingling itself with ordinary conversation. Such-like instances are of too common notoriety to need that they be adduced; but, as I before observed, at the very time that the tendency to do the thing is every day increasing, the pleasure resulting from it is, by the blunted sensibility of the bodily organ, diminished, and the desire is irresistible, though the gratification is nothing. There is rather an entertaining example of this in Fielding's "Life of Jonathan Wild," in that scene where he is represented as playing at cards with the count, a professed gambler. "Such," says Mr. Fielding, "was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the count's pockets, though he knew they were empty; nor could the count abstain from palming a card, though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him." THE USE OF THE PASSIONS.