plants which can extend their roots, indeed, even in pure soil, and fling out a few leaves amid balmy airs and odours, but which burst out in all their luxuriance only from a soil that is fed with constant putrescency, and in an atmosphere which it is poison to inhale. It is not vice—not cold and insensible and contented vice, that has never known any better feelings—which we view with melancholy regret. It is virtue—at least what was once virtue—that has yielded progressively and silently to an influence, scarcely perceived, till it has become the very thing it abhorred. Nothing can be more just than the picture of this sad progress described in the well-known lines of Pope: ‘Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, As, to be hated, needs but to be seen; Yet, seen too oft, familiar with her face, We first endure, then pity, then embrace.’ “In the slow progress of some insidious disease, which is scarcely regarded by its cheerful and unconscious victim, it is mournful to mark the smile of gaiety as it plays over that very bloom, which is not the freshness of health, but the flushing of approaching mortality; amid studies, perhaps, just opening into intellectual excellence, and hopes and plans of generous ambition that are never to be fulfilled. But how much more painful is it to behold that equally insidious and far more desolating progress with which guilty passion steals upon the heart, when there is still sufficient virtue to feel remorse and to sigh at the remembrance of purer years, but not sufficient to throw off the guilt which is felt to be oppressive, and to return to that purity in which it would again, in its bitter moments, gladly take shelter, if only it had energy to vanquish the almost irresistible habits that would tear it back. ‘Crimes lead to greater crimes, and link so straight, What first was _accident_, at last is _fate_: The unhappy servant sinks into a slave, And virtue’s last sad strugglings cannot save.’