them pain to hear repeated. Scandal and tittle-tattle are long banished from good society. After all, to be wise is to be humane. What would our English _blue-stockings_ say to this? The fault and the excellence of Italian society is, that the shocking or disagreeable is not supposed to have an existence in the nature of things.[26] ESSAY XVII THE NEW SCHOOL OF REFORM A DIALOGUE BETWEEN A RATIONALIST AND A SENTIMENTALIST _R._ What is it you so particularly object to this school? Is there any thing so very obnoxious in the doctrine of Utility, which they profess? Or in the design to bring about the greatest possible good by the most efficacious and disinterested means? _S._ Disinterested enough, indeed: since their plan seems to be to sacrifice every individual comfort for the good of the whole. Can they find out no better way of making human life run smooth and pleasant, than by drying up the brain and curdling the blood? I do not want society to resemble a _Living Skeleton_, whatever these ‘Job’s Comforters’ may do. They are like the fox in the fable—they have no feeling themselves, and would persuade others to do without it. Take away the _dulce_ of the poet, and I do not see what is to become of the _utile_. It is the common error of the human mind, of forgetting the end in the means. _R._ I see you are at your _Sentimentalities_ again. Pray, tell me, is it not their having applied this epithet to some of your favourite speculations, that has excited this sudden burst of spleen against them?