Life, without some necessity for exertion (says Mr. Walker[89]), must ever lack real interest. That state is capable of the greatest enjoyment where necessity urges, but not painfully; where effort is required, but as much as possible without anxiety; where the spring and summer of life are preparatory to the harvest of autumn and the repose of winter. Then is every season sweet, and, in a well-spent life, the last the best—the season of calm enjoyment, the richest in recollections, the brightest in hope. Good training and a fair start constitute a more desirable patrimony than wealth; and those parents who study their children’s welfare rather than the gratification of their own avarice or vanity, would do well to think of this. Is it better to run a successful race, or to begin and end at the goal? --------------------- Footnote 88: Richard Sharp. Footnote 89: In _The Original_, a series of Periodical Papers, published in 1835, by Thomas Walker, M.A., one of the Police Magistrates of the Metropolis. ---------------------------- THE ENGLISH CHARACTER. Four and thirty years since, Sir Humphry Davy wrote:“The English as a nation are preëminently active, and the natives of no other country follow their objects with so much force, fire, and constancy. And as human powers are limited, there are few examples of very distinguished men living in this country to old age: they usually fail, droop, and die, before they have attained the period naturally marked out for the end of human existence. The lives of our statesmen, warriors, poets, and even philosophers, offer abundant proofs of the truth of this opinion: whatever burns, consumes; ashes remain. Before the period of youth is passed, gray hairs usually cover those brows which are adorned with the civic oak or the laurel; and in the luxurious and exciting life of the men of pleasure, their tints are not even preserved by the myrtle wreath or the garland of roses from the premature winter of time.” If these characteristics were applicable to English life a third of a century since, how much has their fitness been strengthened by the rapidity of action, the excitement, and want of repose adding to the wear and tear of existence, since that period.