Is there not practical wisdom, in commencing every day with the steady effort, to make as much of it, as if it were to be our whole existence. If we have duties to perform, in themselves severe and laborious, we may inquire, if there be not some way, by which to invest them with pleasant associations? A man may find amusement in his free thoughts, while following his plough upon the hill side; in digging up the words for a dictionary, or in copying out a brief. He may train himself, by an inefficient and shrinking spirit, to recoil from these tasks, as insupportable burdens. How many men find their pleasure, in what would be the positive horror and torment of the indolent! How weak the spirit, and how silly the vanity which we display, in ever renewing narrations of our little personal troubles, pains and misfortunes! If we would have the discretion to measure the sympathy, which we may expect from others, in such discourses, by that, which we are conscious of feeling for theirs of the same character, it would go far to teach us the folly of that querulous spirit, which doles forth the story of sufferings and sorrows, as though the narrator were the only sufferer, and were entitled to a monopoly of all the passing pity. Note 59, page 169. This compendium of the moral acquirements, entering into the character of an accomplished philosopher, I consider one of the happiest, which any book of morals can show. Here is an ample volume of ethics, on a page. How differently would a modern auto-biographer have announced the same facts! In what rounded periods and circuitous expressions would he have striven to convey the same ideas, to impress the reader, that his modesty forbade the frank personality of the Roman philosopher. The whole spirit of this admirable summary would have evaporated in barren generalities. What we admire in the ancients is their noble simplicity and directness, which disdains the vanity of circumlocution, that wishes to hide itself under the semblance of modesty. It seems to me, that it would not be amiss for the clergy of the day to seek the models of their homilies and sermons in such a manner of declaring moral truth. Abstract ethical declamation, and all the scholastic acquirements and the _limæ labor_ are but poor substitutes for that searching directness, which, avoiding abstractions and generalities, appeals at once to the personal consciousness. I allow, that I should love to hear such sermons, as that of Dr Primrose to his fellow prisoners, in the Vicar of Wakefield. There is no eloquence, there can be none, except in simple and direct appeals to thought and conscience. Note 60, page 171.