him who is called upon to undertake the risk of having to pay it in June, to his grievous inconvenience? Does pity only acknowledge the present tense, and not the future? Is it so silly a passion that it only feels for the present wants of an individual who goes a-borrowing, and has no regard to the contingent sorrows of him who, without fault of his own, but with every merit to the contrary, is beguiled into a ruin he did not purchase, in the ineffectual attempt, perhaps, to save one who, supposing him to be personally as worthy, was at least the only person with whom blame, if blame there be, can in such a case be said to rest? SUMMARY.—Fortune is most easily and most certainly to be won by your own unaided exertions. Therefore, depend as little as possible upon prospects of advantages from others, all of whom, you will find, have enough ado with themselves. Be liberal, affable, and kind; but, knowing that you cannot do more injury to society than by greatly injuring yourself, exercise a just caution in giving way to the solicitations of your friends. Never be too ready to convince yourself that it is right to involve yourself largely, in order to help any person into a particular station in society; rather let him begin at the bottom, and he will be all the better fitted for his place, when he reaches it, by having fought his way up through the lower stages. LEISURE. The most fallacious ideas prevail respecting leisure. People are always saying to themselves, “I would do this, and I would do that, if I had leisure.” Now, there is no condition in which the chance of doing any good is _less_ than in the condition of leisure. The man fully employed _may_ be able to gratify his good dispositions by improving himself or his neighbours, or serving the public in some useful way; but the man who has all his time to dispose of as he pleases, has but a poor chance, indeed, of doing so. To do increases the capacity of doing; and it is far less difficult for a man who is in a habitual course of exertion to exert himself a little more for an extra purpose, than for the man who does little or nothing to put himself into motion for the same end. This is owing to a principle of our moral nature, which is called the _vis inertiæ_, literally, the strength of inactivity, but which I will explain at once to unlearned persons, by reminding them, that, to set a common child’s hoop a-going in the first place, requires a smarter stroke than to keep it in motion afterwards. There is a reluctance in all things to be set a-going; but when that is got over, then every thing goes sweetly enough. Just so it is with the idle man. In losing the _habit_, he loses the _power_ of doing. But a man who is busy about some regular employment for a proper length of time every day, can very easily do something else during the remaining hours; indeed, the recreation of the weary man is apt to be busier than the perpetual leisure of the idle. As he walks through the world, his