than to render miserable the person who possessed it. This, of course, is assuming the wretchedness in question to be beyond the sympathiser’s relief. Dr. Smith may be supposed to have had in view Thomson’s celebrated passage: “Ah! little think the gay licentious proud, Whom pleasure, power, and affluence surround; They, who their thoughtless hours in giddy mirth, And wanton, often cruel, riot waste; Ah! little think they, while they dance along, How many feel this very moment death And all the sad variety of pain.” Many variations on that theme of sad variety the poet sings: moving accidents by flood and fire,—pining want, and dungeon glooms,—the many who drink the cup of baleful grief, or eat the bitter bread of misery—sore pierced by wintry winds, how many shrink into the sordid hut of cheerless poverty (the hovel on the heath again), etc., etc., etc. “Thought fond man Of these, and all the thousand nameless ills That one incessant struggle render life One scene of toil, of suffering, and of fate, Vice in his high career would stand appalled, And heedless rambling impulse learn to think; The conscious heart of charity would warm, And her wide wish benevolence dilate; The social tear would rise, the social sigh, And into clear perfection, gradual bliss, Refining still, the social passions work.” This may, perhaps, said Baron Alderson, in winding up a charge to a grand jury, whom he exhorted at that winter season to show sympathy and kindness to the distressed,—this, perhaps, may be one of the objects for which God sends suffering, that it may tend to re-unite those whom prosperity has severed. So Burns— “O ye who, sunk in beds of down, Feel not a want but what yourselves create, Think for a moment on his wretched fate Whom friends and fortune quite disown. Ill-satisfied keen nature’s clam’rous call, Stretch’d on his straw he lays himself to sleep, While through the ragged roof and chinky wall, Chill, o’er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap. ... Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress: A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!”