persevered in without guilt. But even if no such sacrifice were insisted upon, there remain means by which the evil might be mitigated. In the first place, the adherence to honesty on the part of the masters might be exemplary; whereas their actual measure of honesty would perhaps be indicated with sufficient indulgence, if they were described (in the qualified language which Hamlet applies to himself) to be "indifferent honest." There is a currency of untruth in daily use amongst fashionable people for purposes of convenience, which proceeds to a much bolder extent than the social euphemisms by which those of the middle classes also, not perhaps without some occasional violation of their more tender consciences, intimate a wish to be excused from receiving a guest. Fashionable people, moreover, are the most unscrupulous smugglers and buyers of smuggled goods, and have less difficulty than others and less shame, in making various illicit inroads upon the public property and revenue. It is not to be denied that these practices are, in point of fact, a species of lying and cheating; and the latter of them bears a close analogy to the sort of depredation in which the dishonesty of a servant commonly commences. To a servant it must seem quite as venial an offence to trench upon the revenues of a duke, as to the duke it may seem to defraud the revenues of a kingdom. Such proceedings, if not absolutely to be branded as dishonest, are not at least altogether honourable; they are such as may be more easily excused in a menial than in a gentleman. Nor can it ever be otherwise than of evil example to make truth and honesty matters of degree. But there is a worse evil in the manners of this country in regard to servants. It is rarely that they are considered in any other light than as mechanical instruments. It unfortunately belongs very little to our national character to feel what the common brotherhood of humanity requires of us in a relation with our fellow-creatures, which however unequal, is so close as that of master and servant. We are not accustomed to be sensible that it is any part of our duty to enter into their feelings, to understand their dispositions, to acquire their confidence, to cultivate their sympathies and our own upon some common ground which kindness might always discover, and to communicate with them habitually and unreservedly upon the topics which touch upon that ground. This deficiency would perhaps be more observable in the middle classes than in the highest, who seem generally to treat their inferiors with less reserve, but that in the latter the scale of establishment often removes the greater part of a man's servants from personal communication with him. Whether most prevalent in the fashionable or in the unfashionable classes, it is an evil which, in the growing disunion of the several grades of society is now more than ever, and for more reasons than one, to be regretted. (_To be concluded in our next._)