expressed by Spenser:— ‘What more felicity can fall to creature Than to enjoy delight with liberty, And to be lord of all the works of nature? To reign in the air from earth to highest sky, To feed on flowers and weeds of glorious feature, To taste whatever thing doth please the eye? Who rests not pleased with such happiness, Well worthy he to taste of wretchedness!’ Without air or light, they grope their way under-ground, till they are made ‘fierce with dark keeping:’[27] their attention, confined to the same dry, hard, mechanical subjects, which they have not the power nor the will to exchange for others, frets and corrodes; and soured and disappointed, they wreak their spite and mortification on all around them. _R._ I cannot but think your imagination runs away with your candour. Surely the writers you are so ready to inveigh against labour hard to correct errors and reform grievances. _S._ Yes; because the one affords exercise for their vanity, and the other for their spleen. They are attracted by the odour of abuses, and regale on fancied imperfections. But do you suppose they like any thing else better than they do the Government? Are they on any better terms with their own families or friends? Do they not make the lives of every one they come near a torment to them, with their pedantic notions and captious egotism? Do they not quarrel with their neighbours, placard their opponents, supplant those on their own side of the question? Are they not equally at war with the rich and the poor? And having failed (for the present) in their project of _cashiering kings_, do they not give scope to their troublesome, overbearing humour, by taking upon them to _snub_ and lecture the poor _gratis_? Do they not wish to extend ‘the greatest happiness to the greatest numbers,’ by putting a stop to population—to relieve distress by withholding charity, to remedy disease by shutting up hospitals? Is it not a part of their favourite scheme, their nostrum, their panacea, to prevent the miseries and casualties of human life by extinguishing it in the birth? Do they not exult in the thought (and revile others who do not agree to it) of plucking the crutch from the cripple, and tearing off the bandages from the agonized limb? Is it thus they would gain converts, or make an effectual stand against acknowledged abuses, by holding up a picture of the opposite side, the most sordid, squalid, harsh, and repulsive, that narrow reasoning, a want of imagination, and a profusion of bile can make it? There is not enough of evil already in the world, but we must harden our feelings against the miseries that daily, hourly, present themselves to our notice, and set our faces against every thing that promises to afford any one the least gratification or pleasure. This is their _idea of a perfect commonwealth_: where each member performs his part in the machine,