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weather in the sea, leave the surface, when storms prevail, and go deeper. The search after food, as we agreed on a former occasion, is the principal cause why animals change their places. The different tribes of the wading birds always migrate when rain is about to take place; and I remember once, in Italy, having been long waiting, in the end of March, for the arrival of the double snipe in the Campagna of Rome,-a great flight appeared on the 3d of April, and the day after, heavy rain set in, which greatly interfered with my sport. The vulture, upon the same principle, follows armies; and I have no doubt that the augury of the ancients was a good deal founded upon the observation of the instincts of birds. There are many superstitions of the vulgar, owing to the same source. For anglers, in spring, it is always unlucky to see single magpies,but two may be always regarded as a favorable omen; and the reason is, that in cold and stormy weather, one magpie alone leaves the nest in search of food, the other remaining sitting upon the eggs, or the young ones; but when two go out together, the weather is warm and mild, and thus favorable for fishing.

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Poiet. The singular connexions of causes and effects, to which you have just referred, make superstition less to be wondered at, particularly amongst the vulgar; and when two facts, naturally unconnected, have been accidentally coincident, it is not singular that this coincidence should have been observed and registered, and that omens of the most absurd kind, should be trusted in. In the west of England, half a century ago, a particular hollow noise on the sea coast, was referred to a spirit, or goblin, called Bucca, and was supposed to foretell a shipwreck the philosopher knows that sound travels much faster than currents in the air-and the sound always foretold the approach of a very heavy storm, which seldom takes place on that wild and rocky coast, surrounded as it is by the Atlantic, without a shipwreck on some part of its extensive shores.

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FRIENDSHIP.-BROWN.

How great a blessing is it, to have bosoms ever ready for receiving and preserving faithfully, whatever we may wish to confide, whose conscious memory of our actions we may fear less than our own,-whose discourse may alleviate our anxiety, whose counsel may fix our own doubtful judgment, whose hilarity may dissipate our sorrow, whose very aspect may delight.

There is, unquestionably, in the very presence of a friend, a delight of this sort, which has no other source than the consciousness of the presence of one who feels for us the regard which we feel for him. "When I ask myself," says Montaigne, after a very lively description which he gives of his affection for his friend,-" When I ask myself, whence it is, that I feel this joy, this ease, this serenity, when I see him,—it is because it is he, it is besause it is I, I answer; and this is all which I can say.”

On the delights which friendship affords, however, it would be idle to expatiate. There is no subject, scarcely even with the exception of love itself, on which so much has been written, by philosophers and declaimers of all sorts, in prose and poetry. I might repeat to you innumerable common places on the subject, and prove to you, logically, by many arguments, that what you have felt to be delightful, is delightful. For the evidence of this, however, I may safely leave you to your own consciousness. You have many friendships, and, perhaps, your most important and permanent friendships still to form; but if you have never yet felt what friendship is, there is little reason to think that you ever will feel it; and if you have felt it, though you may not yet have been in situations that might enable you to derive from it all the advantages which it is capable of yielding, the very consciousness of the regard itself will enable you to anticipate them all. He who has never been in poverty, in long and almost hopeless disease, in any deep distress of any sort, may yet know, what consolation the attentions of friendship would administer to the sorrow which he has never felt; and if he ever feel the sorrow and the consolation, will not acquire any new knowledge of the extent of the delightful influence which he had long known how to appreciate, but only a new cause of gratitude to him, who, in doing much, had done only what it was expected of his ready tenderness and generosity to do. "There is indeed," as it has been truly said, "only one species of misery which friendship cannot comfort,-the misery of atrocious guilt, but hearts capable of genuine friendship, are not capable of committing crimes. Though it cannot comfort guilt, however, which ought not to be comforted, friendship is still able to console, at least the too powerful remembrance of our faults and weaknesses; its voice reconciles us to ourselves; it shows us the means of rising again from our fall; and our fall itself leads others to forget, in the same manner as it leads us to forget it, by recalling to us, and to others, our estimable qual

ities, and prompting us to the exercise of them. Friendship repairs every thing-remedies every thing-comforts every thing."

Friendship, however, is not a source of pleasure only; it is also a source of duty; and it is chiefly in this respect that we are now to regard it.

The duties that relate to friendship may be considered in three lights-as they regard the commencement of it-the continuance of it-and its close.

Our first duties are those which relate to the choice of a friend.

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If we were sufficiently aware, how great a command over our whole life, we give to any one whom we admit to our intimacy-how ready we are to adopt the errors of those whom we love; and to regard their very faults, not merely as excusable, but as objects of imitation, or at least to imitate them without thinking whether they ought to be imitated, and without knowing even that we are imitating them, we should be a little more careful than we usually are, in making a choice, which is to decide in a great measure, whether we are to be virtuous or vicious, happy or miserable, or which, in many cases, if we still continue happy, upon the whole, must often disturb our happiness; and, if we still continue virtuous, make virtue a greater effort. "The bandage which, in our poetic fictions, we give to Love," says the Marchioness de Lambert, we have never thought of hanging over the clear and piercing eyes of Friendship. Friendship has no blindness: it examines before it engages, and attaches itself only to merit." The picture is a beautiful one; but it is a picture rather of what friendship ought to be, than of what friendship always is. The bandage, indeed, is not so thick as that which covers the eyes of love, and it is not so constantly worn; but when it is worn, though it admits some light, it does not admit all. We must tear it off, before we see clearly; or we must be careful, at least, what hands they are which we permit to put it on.

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It is before we yield ourselves, then, to the regard, that we should strive to estimate the object of it, and to estimate his value, not by the gratification of a single day, but by the influence which he may continue to exercise on our life. If friendship, indeed, were a mere pastime, that ended with the amusement of some idle hours, it might be allowed to us to select, for our companions, those who might best amuse our idleness; it wuold be enough for us, then, that our friend was gay, and had

the happy talent of making others gay. If it were a mere barter of courtesy, for a little wealth or distinction, it might be allowed to us in a like manner, to select those whose power and opulence seemed to promise, to our ambition and avarice, the best return of gain; it would then be enough, if our friend possessed a station that might enable him to elevate us, not perhaps, to his own rank, but at least a little higher than we are. Then, indeed, the propriety or impropriety of friendship might be estimated as readily, and almost in the same manner, as we estimate the worth of any common marketable commodity. But if it be an alliance of heart with heart,-if, in giving our sorrows or projects to be shared by another, we are to partake, in our turn, his sorrows or designs, whatever they may be,-to consider the virtue of him whom we admit to this diffusion with us of one common being, and to yield our affection, only as we discover the virtue which alone is worthy of it, is almost the same thing as to consult for our own virtue. The vice of him whom we love, the vice which we must palliate to every censurer, and which we strive to palliate even to our own severe judgment, will soon cease to appear to us what it is; and it will require but a little longer habit of palliation, and a little longer intercourse of cordial regard, to win from us that occasional conformity, which, with us too, may soon become a habit. Even though we escape from the vices of the wicked, however, it would be impossible for us to escape from their misery. We must share the embarrassment and vexations, the fear and the disgrace, to which their moral errors most inevitably lead them; and, though the friendship of the virtuous had no other superiority of attraction than this one, it would still be enough to determine the choice of the wise,-that, in becoming the friends of the good, they would have nothing to fear but misfortunes, which require pity only, and consolation,-not shame; that, if they had no reason to blush for themselves, they would have no reason to blush for those, whom, by their selection, they had exhibited to the world as images of their own character; nor to feel, in the very innocence of their own heart, by the moral perplexities in which their sympathies involve them, if not what is hateful in guilt, at least all that is wretched in it.

A single line of one of our old poets conveys, in this respect, a most sententious lesson, in bidding us consider what sort of a friend he is likely to prove to us, who has been the destroyer, or at least the constant disquieter, of his own happiness.

"See if he be

Friend to himself, who would be friend to thee."

263

EPISTOLARY WRITING.

TO MISS BAILLIE.-SIR WALTER SCOTT,

Your kind letter, my dear friend, heaps coals of fire on my head, for I should have written to you, in common gratitude, long since; but I waited till I should read through the Miscellany with some attention, which as I have not done, I can scare say much to the purpose, so far as that is concerned. My own production sate in the porch like an evil thing, and scared me from proceeding farther than to hurry through your compositions, with which I was delighted, and two or three others. In my own case, I have almost a nervous reluctance to look back on any recent poetical performance of my own. I may almost say with Macbeth,

"I am afraid to think what I have done.
Look on't again I dare not.

But the best of the matter is, that your purpose has been so satisfactorily answered-and great reason have you to be proud of your influence with the poem-buyers as well as the poemmakers. By the by, you know your request first set me hammering on an old tale of the Swintons, from whom, by the mother's side, I am descended, and the tinkering work I made of it, warmed the heart of a cousin in the East Indies, a descendant of the renowned Sir Allan, who has sent his kindred poet by this fleet, not a butt of sack, but a pipe of most particular Maderia. You and Mrs. Agnes shall have a glass of it when you come to Abbotsford, for I always consider your last only a payment to account-you did not stay half the time you promised. I am going out there on Friday, and shall see all my family re-united around me for the first time these many years. They make a very good figure as 'honest men and bonny lasses.' I read Miss Fanshawe's pieces, which are quite beautiful. Mrs. Hemans is some what too poetical for my tastetoo many flowers, I mean, and too little fruit-but that may be the cynical criticism of an elderly gentleman: it is certain that when I was young, I read verses of every kind with infinitely more indulgence, because with more pleasure than I now do

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