Healthy body, healthy appetite, healthy feelings, though accompanied by mediocrity of talent, unadorned with wit and imagination, and unpolished by learning and science, will outstrip in the race for happiness the splendid irregularities of genius and the most dazzling successes of ambition. At the same time this general view of the probabilities of happiness must be qualified by the admission that mere vegetation scarcely deserves the name of happiness, and that the highest enjoyment which humanity is capable of may be said to consist in the pleasures of reason and imagination--of a mind expatiating among the wonders of nature, and ranging through all the 'changes of many-coloured life,' without being shaken from its equilibrium by the disturbing causes of jealousy, envy, and the evil passions of our nature. The most galling of all conditions is that of him whose conscience and consciousness whisper to him perpetual reproaches, who reflects on what he might have been and who feels and sees what he is. When such a man as Macintosh, fraught with all learning, whose mind, if not kindled into a steady blaze, is perpetually throwing out sparks and coruscations of exceeding brightness, is stung with these self-upbraidings, what must be the reflections of those, the utmost reach of whose industry is far below the value of _his_ most self-accused idleness, who have no self-consolation, are plunged in entire darkness, and have not only to lament the years of omission, but those of commission, not only the opportunities neglected, but the positive mischief done by the debasement of the faculties, the deterioration of the understanding, the impairing of the power of exertion consequent upon a long devotion to low, despicable, unprofitable habits and pursuits? August 27th, 1835 {p.295} [Page Head: STATE OF PARTIES.]