The dying exclamation of the Emperor Augustus, "Has it not been well acted?" An essay on the misery of being always under a mask. A veil may be needful, but never a mask. Instances of people who wear masks in all classes of society, and never take them off even in the most familiar moments, though sometimes they may chance to slip aside. * * * * * The various guises under which Ruin makes his approaches to his victims: to the merchant, in the guise of a merchant offering speculations; to the young heir, a jolly companion; to the maiden, a sighing, sentimentalist lover. * * * * * What were the contents of the burden of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress? He must have been taken for a peddler travelling with his pack. * * * * * To think, as the sun goes down, what events have happened in the course of the day,--events of ordinary occurrence: as, the clocks have struck, the dead have been buried. * * * * * Curious to imagine what murmurings and discontent would be excited, if any of the great so-called calamities of human beings were to be abolished,--as, for instance, death. * * * * * Trifles to one are matters of life and death to another. As, for instance, a farmer desires a brisk breeze to winnow his grain; and mariners, to blow them out of the reach of pirates. * * * * * A recluse, like myself, or a prisoner, to measure time by the progress of sunshine through his chamber. * * * * * Would it not be wiser for people to rejoice at all that they now sorrow for, and _vice versa_? To put on bridal garments at funerals, and mourning at weddings? For their friends to condole with them when they attained riches and honor, as only so much care added? * * * * * If in a village it were a custom to hang a funeral garland or other token of death on a house where some one had died, and there to let it remain till a death occurred elsewhere, and then to hang that same garland over the other house, it would have, methinks, a strong effect. * * * * * No fountain so small but that Heaven may be imaged in its bosom. * * * * * Fame! Some very humble persons in a town may be said to possess it,--as, the penny-post, the town-crier, the constable,--and they are known to everybody: while many richer, more intellectual, worthier persons are unknown by the majority of their fellow-citizens. Something analogous in the world at large. * * * * * The ideas of people in general are not raised higher than the roofs of the houses. All their interests extend over the earth's surface in a layer of that thickness. The meeting-house steeple reaches out of their sphere. * * * * *