habits lessen expense, and their industry insures success; they grow rich, and their children desert the society. The children of the rich find its restraints irksome, and are converted-not by strong argument, not by incontrovertible authority, not by any honourable and worthy sense of duty, but by the pleasures of the card-table, the ball-room, and the theatre. But the great agents in converting young Quakers to the established Church of England are the tailors. The whole works of Bellarmine could not produce such an effect upon them as a pattern-book of forbidden cloths and buttons. Nor could any reason be urged to them so forcible as the propriety of appearing like other people, and conforming to the strict orthodoxy of fashion.

Odd as it may seem, this feeling has far more influence among the men than among the women of the society. The women who quit it usually desert for love, for which there is this good reason, that

education of their sons. Women are easily converted in their youth; they make amends for this pliancy as they advance in life, and become the most useful diffusers of their own faith.

The diminution of the sect is not very manifest; and it is kept up by proselytes who silently drop in, for they no longer seek to make converts, and are even slow in admitting them.

members, if they are

Perhaps these new

sufficiently nume

rous, may imperceptibly bring them nearer to the manners of the world in their

ар

pearance, and thus lessen the main cause. of their decline.

LETTER LVIII.

Winter Weather.Snow-Christmas.Old Customs gradually disused.

Jan. 2, 1803.

"If you would live' in health," says the

proverb, wear the same garment in sum

mer which you wear in winter." It seems as if the English had some such fool's adage, by the little difference there is between their summer and their winter apparel. The men, indeed, when they go abroad put on a great coat, and the women wear muffs, and fur round the neck; but all these are laid aside in the house. I no longer wonder why these people talk so much of the weather; they live in the most inconstant of all climates, against which it is so difficult to take any, effectual

precaution, that they have given the matter up in despair, and take no precautions at all. Their great poet, Milton, describes the souls of the condemned as being hurried from fiery into frozen regions: perhaps he took the idea from his own feelings on such a day as this, when, like me, he was scorched on one side and frost-bitten on the other; and, not knowing which of the two torments was the worst, assigned them to the wicked both in turn. "Why do you not warm your rooms like the Germans," I say to them, "and diffuse the heat equally on all sides ?" "Oh,” the reply, "it is so dismal not to see the fire !" And so for the sake of seeing the fire, they are contented to be half starved and half roasted at the same time, and to have more women and children burnt to death in one year than all the heretics who ever suffered in England in the days when heresy was thought a crime.

I happened to sleep in the country when the first snow fell; and in the morning

when I looked out of window every thing was white, and the snow flakes like feathers floating and falling with as endless and ever-varying motions as the dance of musquitos in a summer evening. And this mockery of life was the only appearance of life; and indeed it seemed as if there could be nothing living in such a world. The trees were clothed like the earth, every bough, branch, and spray; except that side of the bark which had not been exposed to the wind, nothing was to be seen but what was perfectly and dazzlingly white; and the evergreens in the garden were bent beneath the load. White mountains in the distance can give no idea of this singular effect. I was equally delighted with the incrustation upon the inside of the windows. Nothing which I have ever seen equals the exquisite beauty of this frost-work. But when I returned to London the scene was widely different.→ There the atmosphere is so full of soot from the earth coal, that the snow is sullied as