La Bruyère observes that “la santé et les richesses ôtent aux hommes l’expérience du mal, leur inspirent la dureté pour leurs semblables;” and adds, that “les gens déjà chargés de leur propre misère sont ceux qui entrent davantage, par leur compassion, dans celle d’autrui.” If these by comparison become wondrous kind, it is their fellow-feeling that makes them so. _Haud ignari mali, miseris succurrere discunt._ In another chapter of his “Characters,” La Bruyère sketches the portrait of one he styles Champagne, who “au sortir d’un long dîner qui lui enfle l’estomac, et dans les douces fumées d’un vin d’Avenay ou de Sillery, signe un ordre qu’on lui présente, qui ôterait le pain à toute une province, si l’on n’y remédiait: il est excusable. Quel moyen de comprendre, dans la première heure de la digestion, qu’on puisse quelque part mourir de faim?” _Il est excusable_, on the principle of Horace Walpole’s similar plea, or apology, for unheeding royalty. He writes to Miss Hannah More that he used to hate that king and t’other prince—but that on reflection he found the censure ought to fall on human nature in general. “They are made of the same stuff as we, and dare we say what we should be in their situation? Poor creatures! think how they are educated, or rather corrupted, early, how flattered! To be educated properly, they should be led through hovels [as Lear was on the heath—somewhat late in life], and hospitals, and prisons. Instead of being reprimanded (and perhaps immediately afterwards _sugar-plum’d_) for not learning their Latin or French grammar, they now and then should be kept fasting; and, if they cut their finger, should have no plaster till it festered. No part of a royal brat’s memory, which is good enough, should be burthened but with the remembrance of human suffering.” “_Il y a une espèce de honte d’être heureux à la vue de certaines misères_,” writes La Bruyère again. Adam Smith, however, made a dead set against what he calls those “whining and melancholy moralists,” who he complains, are perpetually reproaching us with our happiness, while so many of our brethren are in misery, who regard as impious the natural joy of prosperity, which does not think of the many wretches that are at every instant labouring under all sorts of calamities, in the languor of poverty, in the agony of disease, etc. “Commiseration for those miseries which we never saw, which we never heard of, but which we may be assured are at all times infesting such numbers of our fellow-creatures, ought, they think, to damp the pleasures of the fortunate, and to render a certain melancholy dejection habitual to all men.” Adam Smith opposes this “extreme sympathy” as altogether absurd and unreasonable; as unattainable too, so that a certain affected and sentimental sadness is the nearest approach that can be made to it; and he further declares that this disposition of mind, though it could be attained, would be perfectly useless, and could serve no other purpose