That the doctrine which I now advocate is correct, appears also from the effect produced upon our feelings when we observe habit taking the place of sentiment in the performance of duty. We have all seen persons enter upon a course of virtuous activity, and continue it for a time from a sense of duty, sustained by ardent feeling; but after a time the feeling has died away, and there has come in its stead habit, or a regard to consistency, to sustain the sense of duty in keeping up the same course of external action. When this change has taken place, we are all conscious that the beauty of the conduct is greatly diminished;--its spirit has vanished; the dew of its youth is exhaled. I said that this was a practical point, and I now wish to show, in connexion with it, precisely how it is that mischief arises from the perversion of moral taste; as was shown, in the former Lecture, how it arises from its perversion in other things. In opposition to the hard and dry characters mentioned above, there are those whose susceptibilities are acute, whose sympathies are quick, whose feelings are generous, whose affections are ardent, who do every thing so promptly and so heartily that impulse seems almost to supply the place of principle. There is something very attractive in a character of this kind; there is an ease and freedom about it which seems to put aside all labor of calculation, and it moreover exhibits our nature in the pleasing garb of natural goodness. It is for this reason that novelists, who draw men as they wish to have them, and not as they are, have almost universally made these fine instincts of humanity the guide of their hero, and the basis of his character. This is, indeed, if I understand it, the basis of this kind of literature, and one chief source of the injury it produces. The exhibition of these instincts, and affections, and emotions, springing up at random and acting without the control of principle, holds out no stimulus to exertion; and their possession and exercise is often in fact, and often too in books, connected with great corruption of moral character.