injury has been done intentionally, unless he who has been guilty of it, has done it without any fair and lawful pretext; and that after all, where it cannot be forgiven with propriety, it must be punished with moderation. So that education teaches us at last to support a large class of griefs without gratifying the propensity to resentment; and confines the gratification of that passion to where the injury has been inflicted by a rational being, intentionally and unjustly. There still exists, however, through life, the strongest disposition to connect together grief, pain, and resentment; and it requires the strongest and steadiest appeal to the principles of justice to keep it down. We often kick a stock or a stone, over which we have stumbled, from the mere habit we have acquired of associating resentment with pain. We feel a sort of resentment against the person who brings us bad news. Zinzis Khan cut off the head of one of his favourites for venturing to inform him of a partial defeat his troops had sustained. The raising up of the passion of resentment, causes an immediate diversion of the passion of grief; and therefore, the feeling of resentment in cases of grief, seems to be sought after, in some badly constituted minds, as a sort of relief. Suppose any person were to purchase a piece of painted glass for three or four hundred pounds; it is discovered to have fallen down, and is broken to pieces; the disposition of resentment to follow displeasure is so great, that I am afraid it would be some relief to find that this had been knocked down by a careless servant; and that the master would not be very well pleased with his servant, who could give him such an account of the business as precluded the master from all possibility of scolding. A child is rarely deformed, or rarely dies, by the hand of nature; but, according to the parent, the nurse has mismanaged it, or the physician destroyed it by his ignorance. Men in violent pain, are excessively irascible, very strongly disposed to quarrel and find

fault. A gamester, who has lost a thousand pounds, comes home, and relieves his uneasiness by quarrelling with his wife and children, and abusing his servants. All these are instances of the strong disposition of mankind to associate together grief and resentment; in these instances, the disposition is so strongly evinced, that it entirely overpowers all sense of justice.

Contempt is that painful emotion which a human being excites in you, by his degrading qualities or conduct. Contempt only diminishes resentment, in those injuries which depend upon the character of the person who inflicts them. A libel may be written by a man so infamous, that all the severe things he has said are rendered harmless by the name which is subscribed to them; here, my resentment is less, because the grief I feel, is so much less, from having been traduced by such a man: but if the same man were to set my house on fire, or assault me with a large stick, the general contemptibility of his character, would certainly have very little effect in diminishing my resentment. Contempt diminishes resentment by diminishing danger. the cause of resentment.

Peevishness is resentment, excited by trifles. Envy is resentment, excited by superiority, not by all superiority, but by that to which you think you are fairly entitled for a ploughman does not envy a king; but he envies another ploughman who has a shilling a week more than he has. Malice is pure malevolence; a desire to inflict injury without a cause; an abstract love of doing mischief; - at least, so it is commonly said to be: but there can hardly be any such passion; it must be a desire of doing mischief for some very slight and foolish cause. I don't like the cut of a man's coat, or the make of his face; or, he talks too quick, or too slow, or some other such absurd and childish reason, which makes me his enemy, and inclines me to do him harm. Sulkiness, is anger half subdued by fear. Jealousy, is

another modification of anger; the causes of which, I believe, there is no occasion I should explain. Cruelty, is rather a habit than a passion: it will easily appear, however, that it is the genuine and necessary offspring of anger, often indulged and gratified. It is most apt to arise in proud, selfish, and timorous persons, who conceive highly of their own merits, and of the consequent injustice of all offences committed against them; and who have an exquisite feeling and apprehension in respect of private gratification and uneasiness. Montesquieu has made this remark: he says, that all persons accustomed to the implicit gratification of the will, are very apt to be cruel.

Fear, is the apprehension of future evil. Habit diminishes fear, when it raises up contrary associations; and increases it, when it confirms the first associations. Α soldier, who has often escaped, begins to disunite the two ideas of dying and fighting; he connects also with fighting, a sense of duty, and a love of glory. Habit, I should think, would increase the sensation of fear, in a person who had undergone two or three painful operations, and was about to submit to another. A man works in a gunpowder-mill every day of his life, with the utmost sang froid, which you would not be very much pleased to enter for half an hour: you have associated with the manufactory, nothing but the accidents you have heard it is exposed to; he has associated with it, the numberless days he has past there in perfect security. For the same reason, a sailor-boy stands unconcerned upon the mast; a mason upon a ladder; and a miner descends by his single rope. Their associations are altered by experience; therefore, in estimating the degree in which human creatures are under the influence of this passion, we must always remember their previous habits. A woman conceives, early in life, such dreadful notions of war, and all the instruments of war, that no degree of maternal tenderness, probably, would

induce her to take a sword and pistol, and go and fight: but in the time of a public plague, she would despise her own life, nurse her sick husband, or her children, and expose herself to death, as boldly as any grenadier. In the late attack upon Egypt, our soldiers behaved with the most distinguished courage; but a physician did what, I suppose, no soldier in the whole army would have dared to have done; - he slept for three nights in the sheets of a patient who had died of the plague! If the question had been to encounter noisy, riotous, death, he probably could not have done it; but where pus and miasma were concerned, he appears to have been a perfect hero. Fear, is the most contagious of all the passions; and the reason is obvious enough why it becomes so it is much more likely that the cause of your fear should concern me, more than the cause of any other of your passions. If I see you very angry, it is not probable, unless we happen to be intimately connected, that the cause of your anger would prove to be a cause of mine; but if I see you dreadfully frightened, it immediately occurs to me, that I am implicated in the same cause of fear: - you have discovered that the play-house in which we are both sitting, is on fire; you have seen an enraged bull, running in the streets: I am not easy for an instant, till I have discovered the cause of your terror, and satisfied myself, that it does not concern us both.

The passion of fear, in its ordinary state, is a vibration of the mind, between the expectation of good, and the expectation of evil; in which contest, however, the expectation of evil preponderates. The moment all hope is banished, and nothing remains but despair, (the expectation of certain evil,) the passion assumes a new form; very often that of the most furious resentment. A rat is a very timid animal, with respect to men; but get a rat into a corner, where all possibility of escape is precluded, and a rat will fly at you like a tiger. The

instances are innumerable of the heroic exploits performed by small bodies of troops, whose fears, despair has converted into resentment. In cases where there is no room for resentment,— as in shipwreck,- despair produces various species of insanity, stupor, and delirium, while the sailors are only afraid; that is, while there is a mixture of two passions; they work, and do all they can for their safety. The moment there is no more hope, - so impossible is it for the ordinary mass of human beings to look steadily at great and certain evil, that many jump overboard and drown themselves; some are quite stupified; others completely raving mad.

A great propensity to fear is, I should imagine, capable of some degree of cure. The living with brave men, would certainly go a great way to diminish this passion of fear; as all our qualities of mind, whether good or bad, are highly contagious. To put ourselves in situations where we must act before many witnesses, operates as a check upon fear, by raising up contrary passions, of the dread of shame. It It very often happens, in cases of danger, that some one present, is more under the influence of this passion than ourselves, and that this example, instead of increasing our fear, produces the contrary effect, of diminishing it: we become ashamed of our companion's weakness; then of our own. Vanity induces us, also, to make a display of our superiority; and, by this effort, the fear is diminished. Fear is repeatedly overcome by affection, and compassion. A mother would run away from a dog, if her child was not with her; but she faces him very boldly when her fears are excited for another. A sudden cry of distress, will induce a man, very often, to do what no regard for his own safety could possibly impel him to perform.

Suspicion, clearly belongs to the family of fear: it is that passion applied to the motives and intentions of human creatures. For instance, we should not call a