hands hang unmuffled and ready by his side, and he can sometimes do more by a single touch in passing, than a vacant man is likely to do in a twelvemonth. All this is exemplified fully in the actual practice of life. Who, I would ask, compose the class who perform most of the business of public charity? It is not those who are highly endowed with wealth and leisure. It is not in general those whom wealth has placed at ease, but the class of well-employed traders and manufacturers, who, to appearance, are entirely engrossed by their own concerns. These men will snatch an occasional hour from their well-employed lives—perhaps an hour that ought to be devoted to relaxation—and do you more real work in that time than an idle man would accomplish in the half of his yaw-yaw existence. What is curious, if you place the busy trader on the shelf, as no longer requiring to work for his subsistence, he immediately loses the power of doing these little superfluous acts of goodness. In getting out of the way of all exertion, he becomes unable to do any thing, even when he wishes it. On the same principle, men never give a job to a lawyer or any body else, who is not pretty well occupied. And this is from no irrational homage to the name of the man, as is sometimes thought; it is because the man who does much is most likely to do more, and most likely to do it well. Let no man, then, cry for leisure in order to do any thing. Let him rather pray that he may never have leisure. If he really wishes to do any good thing, he will always find time for it, by properly arranging his other employments. The person who thus addresses the public has acquired the power of doing so, such as it is, not by having had a great deal of time at his own disposal, but solely by ravishing the inglorious hours which the most of men spend in unprofitable and _unenjoyed_ pleasures, and employing them in the cultivation of his mind. There is an anecdote told of a French author of distinction, who by regularly employing, in a few jottings, the five minutes which his wife caused him to wait every day while she dressed for dinner, at last formed a book; certainly not the least meritorious of his works. Hazlitt also remarks, that many men walk as much idly upon Pall Mall in a few years, as would carry them round the globe. In fact, it may be said that to ask for leisure or time to do any ordinary thing, is equivalent to a confession that we are indifferent about doing it.