Suppose competence, health, and honesty; then a happy marriage depends on four things:--1. An understanding proportionate to thine, that is, a recipiency at least of thine:--2. natural sensibility and lively sympathy in general:--3. steadiness in attaching and retaining sensibility to its proper objects in its proper proportions:--4. mutual liking; including person and all the thousand obscure sympathies that determine conjugal liking, that is, love and desire to A. rather than to B. This seems very obvious and almost trivial: and yet all unhappy marriages arise from the not honestly putting, and sincerely answering each of these four questions: any one of them negatived, marriage is imperfect, and in hazard of discontent. DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HOBBES AND SPINOSA. In the most similar and nearest points there is a difference, but for the most part there is an absolute contrast, between Hobbes and Spinosa. Thus Hobbes makes a state of war the natural state of man from the essential and ever continuing nature of man, as not a moral, but only a frightenable, being:--Spinosa makes the same state a necessity of man out of society, because he must then be an undeveloped man, and his moral being dormant; and so on through the whole. THE END MAY JUSTIFY THE MEANS. Whatever act is necessary to an end, and ascertained to be necessary and proportionate both to the end and the agent, takes its nature from that end. This premised, the proposition is innocent that ends may justify means. Remember, however, the important distinction:--'Unius facti diversi fines esse possunt: unius actionis non possunt'. I have somewhere read this remark:--'Omne meritum est voluntarium, aut voluntate originis, aut origine voluntatis'. Quaintly as this is expressed, it is well worth consideration, and gives the true meaning of Baxter's famous saying,--"Hell is paved with good intentions." NEGATIVE THOUGHT. On this calm morning of the 13th of November, 1809, it occurs to me, that it is by a negation and voluntary act of no thinking that we think of earth, air, water, &c. as dead. It is necessary for our limited powers of consciousness, that we should be brought to this negative state, and that this state should pass into custom; but it is likewise necessary that at times we should awake and step forward; and this is effected by those extenders of our consciousness--sorrow, sickness, poetry, and religion. The truth is, we stop in the sense of life just when we are not forced to go on, and then adopt a permission of our feelings for a precept of our reason. MAN'S RETURN TO HEAVEN. Heaven bestows light and influence on this lower world, which reflects the blessed rays, though it cannot recompense them. So man may make a return to God, but no requital. YOUNG PRODIGIES. Fair criticism on young prodigies and Rosciuses in verse, or on the stage, is arraigned,-- as the envious sneaping frost That bites the first-born infants of the spring.