justly punished by being shown how hateful we think him, but we must not, on pretence of justice, commit the injustice of depriving him of a right which is confessedly his. It is not, then, by being rightfully liable to punishment that unjust differs from ungenerous conduct. The latter also ofttimes deserves and incurs punishment. But since there can be no merit in doing that the not doing of which would merit punishment, it may seem that, as in justice so likewise in generosity there cannot be anything positively meritorious. Neither in truth would there be if conduct were entitled to be styled generous simply as being the reverse of ungenerous. Generosity would then, like justice, be a virtue in no higher sense than that of not being a vice--a negative virtue if a virtue at all. But an action does not really deserve to be called generous unless what justice requires be exceeded by it in a degree more than sufficient to prevent the agent from deserving the imputation of meanness, nor even then unless the excess have been done from a purer motive than that of the hope of praise or other reward. An action is generous only in the proportion in which it involves self-sacrifice, voluntarily undergone for the benefit of others, without any view on the agent's part to further compensation than that derivable from the consciousness of making other people happy. In such voluntary and disinterested self-sacrifice consists the merit which is one chief characteristic of generosity as of most positive virtue, distinguishing it from justice, in which there is never a surrender of anything which one would be warranted in keeping, but merely a rendering of what belongs or is due to others. All conduct, not immoral, admits, as already more than once intimated, of a tripartite division, into that which may be rightfully enforced; that of which, though it be not due nor rightfully enforcible, neglect deserves to be and may justly be punished by reproaches; that which is neither due nor reasonably to be looked for, but which involves a voluntary surrender for the good of others of some good which one might without reproach keep for oneself. Of this last description is the only conduct in which there is any proper or positive virtue.