being! I am pleased with that expression attributed in the newspapers to Lord Wellington, that if he thought even the hairs on his head were acquainted with any of his plans, he would shave them off and wear a wig. In the same narrative (which whether false or authentic it is needless for me to consider) it is observed, that Lord W. is always frank and cheerful among his brother officers; an example of frankness and reserve, existing (as in fact they almost invariably do) at one and the same time in a great character. Unreserved communication of our best thoughts debases and contaminates and weakens the mind; and conversation, when it rises much above the usual tone of fashionable insipidity, too often serves only to waste our energies in perishable words, without the attainment of any object which a wise man can wish for. H. F. A. N° XCIV. On Sensibility. то THE RUMINATOR. ""Tis not as heads that never ache suppose, The screws reversed, a task which, if he please, Ten thousand thousand strings at once go loose, COWPER, The narrow-minded and unfeeling are ever apt to confound together that artificial weakness and instability of character, which arise from circumstances external and adventitious, from the influence of adversity, of improper education, or of ill health and morbid sensibility, with that natural and unalterable imbecility which is the characteristic of an absolute fool or madman. But there is a very wide difference between the unhappy sufferer, whose faculties have been weakened by the pressure of misfortune, by the influence of defects in early education, or by nerves morbidly irritable, who knows and feels his own deficiencies, and yet exhibits at intervals many "an unquenched ray" of the divine lamp of intellect, many a generous though ineffectual struggle for its resuscitation, and a character of the baser stamp, or an absolute fool or maniac; in whom we frequently, and indeed almost always find intellectual weakness ac companied with astonishing bodily health and vigour, and abundance of self-complacency. There is even a good deal of truth in what Lord North, author of the "Foreste of Varieties," who has written more genuine and undisguised confessions than any one I know, except Cowper, says in excuse for his own imprudence and seeming criminality of conduct, which he boldly ascribes to the influence of disease, and of poisonous drugs given him by ignorant. physicians. Education is another mode by which faculties that might have risen even to first rate eminence, may be thrown into disorder, and utterly extinguished. And how very few individuals can possibly have been educated according to nature! Great men, those illustrious characters who are fitted to become the luminaries of the world, must, in their childhood, as in their after years, stand alone; they have no feelings in unison with those by whom they are surrounded. How hapless then is their lot, and how are they to be saved; a few have luckily been reared convenienter naturæ, while many have perished "unwept, unhonoured;" and those few, in consequence, have become "burning and shining lights," the benefactors of their age and country, and of ages and nations yet unborn. For my own part, Mr. RUMINATOR, I do not believe that my faculties could, under the happiest auspices, ever have been brilliant; I suffer at present so much from adversity, that my feeble grasp can scarcely guide the pen with which I endeavour to arrest my feelings; but I do think that to be reckoned for this reason an absolute fool would be too hard a sentence; and perhaps I may be forgiven for adding, that I am positively certain, were the difficulties under which I labour surmounted, were I not overwhelmed by the pressure of uncongenial characters and habits and employments, my powers, humble as they are, might yet for a little while emerge, and I should not then have been born wholly in vain. H. F. A. N° XCV. Men of high Endowments cannot often raise the Sympathy af Common Minds. TO THE RUMINATOR. THE harshness and error and obstinacy of worldly minded ordinary characters would be nothing, if it were not for the tendency in the sensitive and highly gifted, to endeavour to inspire them with feelings kindred to their own, and to look to them (alas, how vainly !) for brotherly love, and support, and consolation. Nothing is more melancholy than to behold a man of genius endeavouring to move the affections, and to rouse up the imagination and taste, of those in whom these qualities are utterly dormant, in whose breasts perhaps even the germs do not exist. Enough of this appears in the inestimable" Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, in the Life and Letters of Burns, and above all, in that admirable passage of Godwin's "Man of Feeling," in which his hero, with vain benevolence, endeavours to inspire his wife with his own ardour of delight in perusing one of the finest plays of Beaumont and Fletcher In |