weakness of human nature, and how unable it is to support its own dignity when attacked by the adversities of fortune, and the malice of mankind. The greatness of Rousseau ought to be erected on a different basis: for his earliest works are certainly sufficient to support the extent of his fame as an author, however they may, on particular subjects, expose his integrity as a man. The anxieties which a vehemence of imagination, and a tender texture of the nervous system at all times produce, are highly injurious to the faculties of the mind; and, when accompanied by sickness or by sorrow, wear out the intellect in proportion to its vigor and activity. To use the popular metaphor upon this subject, “The sword becomes too sharp for the scabbard;” and the body and the mind are thereby exposed to mutual destruction. Religious melancholy is, of all other descriptions of this dreadful disease, most heightened and aggravated by solitude. The dreadful idea of having irretrievably lost the divine favor, and of being an object unworthy of the intercession of our Saviour, incessantly haunts the mind, laboring under religious despondency; and the imagination being left, in solitude, entirely to its own workings, increases the horrors which such thoughts must unavoidably inspire. Her lash Tisiphone that moment shakes, The mind she scourges with a thousand snakes, And to her aid, with many a thundering yell; Calls her dire sisters from the gulf of hell! These mutual tortures, even when heightened by the gloominess of solitude, are frequently still further increased by the mischievous doctrines of bigoted priests, who by mistaking the effects of nervous derangement, or theological errors, for the compunctious visitings of a guilty mind, establish and mature, by the injudicious application of scriptural texts, and precepts of casuistry, the very disease which they thus ignorantly and presumptuously endeavor to remove. The wound, thus tainted by the most virulent and corrosive of the intellectual poisons, becomes extremely difficult to cure. The pure and uncontaminated tenets of the Christian faith furnishes, perhaps, the surest antidotes; and when these balms of true comfort are infused by such enlightened and discerning minds as Luther, Tillotson, and Clark, the most rational hope may be entertained of a speedy recovery. The writings of those holy teachers confirm the truth of the observation, that the deleterious gloom of superstition assumes a darker aspect in the shades of retirement, and they uniformly exhort the unhappy victims of this religious error to avoid solitude as the most certain enemy of this dreadful infirmity.