in the general conduct of human life. Perhaps, indeed, they are not to be regarded as institutes of morality calculated to instruct an individual in his duty, fo much as a species of law books and law authorities, fuited to the practice of those courts of justice, whose decisions are regulated by general principles of natural equity in conjunction with the maxims of the Roman code: of which kind, I understand, there are many upon the continent. To which may be added concerning both these authors, that they are more occupied in defcribing the rights and usages of independent communities, than is neceffary in a work which profeffes, not to adjust the correspondence of nations, but to delineate the offices of domestic life. The profufion alfo of claffical quotations, with which many of their pages abound, seems to me a fault from which it will not be easy to excufe them. If these extracts be intended as decorations of style, the compofition is overloaded with orna

ments

ments of one kind. To any thing more than ornament they can make no claim. To propose them as ferious arguments; gravely to attempt to establish or fortify a moral duty by the tellimony of a Greek or Roman poet, is to trifle with the attention of the reader, or rather to take it off from all just principles of reasoning in morals.

Of our own writers in this branch of philofophy, I find none that I think perfectly free from the three objections which I have ftated. There is likewife a fourth property obfervable in almost all of them, namely, that they divide too much the law of nature from the precepts of revelation; some authors induftriously declining the mention of fcripture authorities, as belonging to a different province, and others referving them for a separate volume: which appears to me much the fame defect, as if a commentator on the laws of England fhould content himfelf with ftating upon each head the common law of the land, without taking any no

tice of acts of parliament; or should choofe to give his readers the common law in one book, and the ftatute law in another. "When "the obligations of morality are taught," fays a pious and celebrated writer, "let the "fanctions of Christianity never be forgotten; by which it will be fhewn that they give

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ftrength and luftre to each other; religion "will appear to be the voice of reason, and morality the will of God."*

The manner also, in which modern writers have treated of fubjects of morality, is, in my judgment, liable to much exception. It has become of late a fashion to deliver moral inftitutes in ftrings or feries of detached propositions, without fubjoining a continued ar⚫gument or regular differtation to any of them. This fententious, apothegmatizing style, by crowding propofitions and paragraphs too faft upon the mind, and by carrying the eye of the reader from subject to subject in too quick a fucceffion, gains not a fufficient hold

* Preface to The Preceptor, by Dr. Johnson.

upon

upon the attention, to leave either the memory furnished, or the understanding fatisfied. However useful a syllabus of topics, or a series of propofitions may be in the hands of a lecturer, or as a guide to a student, who is supposed to confult other books, or to institute upon each fubject researches of his own, the method is by no means convenient for ordinary readers; because few readers are fuch thinkers as to want only a hint to set their thoughts at work upon; or fuch as will pause and tarry at every propofition, till they have traced out its dependency, proof, relation, and confequences, before they permit themselves to step on to another. A respectable writer of this class* has comprised his doctrine of flavery in the three following propofitions.

"No one is born a flave, because every one is born with all his original rights."

"No one can become a flave, because no

* Dr. Ferguson, author of "Institutes of Moral Philo"sophy," 1767.

one from being a person can, in the lan

guage of the Roman law, become a thing, "or fubject of property."

"The fuppofed property of the master in "the flave, therefore, is matter of ufurpa“tion, not of right."

It may be poffible to deduce from these few adages fuch a theory of the primitive rights of human nature, as will evince the illegality of flavery; but surely an author requires too much of his reader, when he expects him to make these deductions for himself; or to supply, perhaps from fome remote chapter of the fame treatise, the several proofs and explanations, which are neceffary to render the meaning and truth of these assertions intelligible.

There is a fault, the oppofite of this, which fome moralists who have adopted a different, and, I think, a better plan of compofition,

have not always been careful to avoid; namely, the dwelling upon verbal and elementary distinctions, with a labour and prolixity,