cold courtesies which pass current under that name, the mere knowledge of fashionable manners, and an exact adherence to them. It is in its most essential respects what may be possessed by those who know little of the varying vocabulary and varying usages of the season. The knowledge of these is, indeed, necessary to such as mingle in the circles which require them; but they are necessary only as the new fashion of the coat or splendid robe, which leaves him or her who wears it the same human being, in every respect, as before; and are not more a part of either, than the ticket of admission, which opens to their ready entrance the splendid apartment from which the humble are excluded. The true politeness of the heart is something which cannot be given by those who minister to mere decoration. It is the moral grace of life, if I may venture so to term it-the grace of the mind; and what the world counts graces, are little more than graces of the body. Such is benevolence in the various forms in which it may be instrumental to happiness; and, in being thus instrumental to the happiness of others, it has truly a source of happiness within itself. It may not feel, indeed, all the enjoyment which it wishes to diffuse for its wishes are unlimited-but it feels an enjoyment that is as wide as all the happiness which it sees around it, or the still greater and wider happiness of which it anticipates the existence. The very failure of a benevolent wish only breaks its delight, without destroying it; for when one wish of good has failed, it has still other wishes of equal or greater good that arise, and occupy and bless it as before. In considering the various ways in which benevolence may be active, we have seen how extensive it may be as a feeling of the heart. If wealth, indeed, were necessary, there would be few who could enjoy it, or at least who could enjoy it largely. But pecuniary aid, as we have seen, is only one of many forms of being useful. To correct some error, moral or intellectual-to counsel those who are in doubt, and who in such circumstances require instruction, as the indigent require alms-even though nothing more were in our power to show an interest in the welfare of the happy, and a sincere commiseration of those who are in sorrow; in these, and in innumerable other ways, the benevolent, however scanty may be their means of conferring what alone the world calls benefactions, are not benevolent only, but beneficent; as truly beneficent, or far more so, as those who squander in loose prodigalities to the deserving and the undeserving, the sufferers from their own thoughtless dissipation, or the sufferers from the injustice or dissipation of others, almost as much as they loosely squander on a few hours of their own sensual appetites. Even in pecuniary liberalities, benevolence does not merely produce good, but it knows well, or it learns to know, the greatest amount of good which its liberalities can produce. To be the cause of less happiness or comfort than might be diffused at the same cost, is almost a species of the same vice which withholds aid from those who require it. The benevolent, therefore, are magnificent in their bounty, because they are economical even in bounty itself. Their heart is quick to perceive sources of relief where others do not see them; and the whole result of happiness produced by them, seems often to have arisen from a superb munificence which few could command, when it may, perhaps, have proceeded only from humble means, which the possessor of similar means, without similar benevolence, would think scarcely more than necessary for his own strict necessities. How beautifully, in Pope's well known description of an individual, whose simple charities have made him as illustrious as the most costly profusion of charity in other circumstances could have done, is this quick tendency to minister to every little comfort marked, in the provision which he is represented as making, not for gross and obvious miseries only, but for the very ease of the traveller or common passenger. But all our praises why should lords engross! But clear and artless, pouring through the plain Balked are the courts, and contest is no more.1 What is it which makes this picture of benevolence 1 Moral Essays, Epistle iii. v. 249–272. so peculiarly pleasing? It is not the mere quantity of happiness produced, even when taken in connexion with the seemingly disproportionate income, the few hundred pounds a-year which were so nobly devoted to the production of that happiness. It is pleasing, chiefly from the air of beautiful consistency that appears in so wide a variety of good, the evidence of a genuine kindness of heart, that was quick, as I have said, to perceive, not the great evils only which force themselves upon every eye, but the little comforts also which might be ministered to those, of whom the rich, even when they are disposed to extend to them the indolent succour of their alms, and sometimes, too, the more generous succour of their personal aid, are yet accustomed to think only as sufferers who are to be kept alive, rather than as human beings who are to be made happy. We admire, indeed, the active services with which the Man of Ross distributed the weekly bread, built houses that were to be homes of repose for the aged and indigent, visited the sick, and settled amicably the controversies of neighbours and friends, who might otherwise have become foes in becoming litigants; but it is when, together with these prominent acts of obvious beneficence, we consider the acts of attention to humbler, though less obvious wants, that we feel, with lively delight and confidence, the kindness of a heart which, in its charitable meditations, could think of happiness as well as of misery, and foresee means of happiness, which the benevolent, indeed, can easily produce, but which are visible only to the benevolent. It is by its inattention to the little wants of man, that ostentation distinguishes itself from charity; and a sagacious observer needs no other test, in the silent disdain or eager reverence of his heart, to separate the seeming benevolence, which seeks the applauding voices of crowds, from the real benevolence, which seeks only to be the spreader of happiness or consolation. It is impossible for the most ostentatious producer of the widest amount of good, with all his largesses, and with all his hypocrisy, to be consistent in his acts of seeming kindness; because, to be consistent, he must have that real kindness which sees what the cold simulator of benevolence is incapable of seeing, and does, therefore, what such a cold dissembler is incapable even of imagining. LECTURE LXXXVII. Of the Positive Duties which we owe to certain Individuals only-arising from Affinity, Friendship, Benefits received, Contract. IN my last Lecture, Gentlemen, I concluded the remarks which I had to offer on the duties, negative and positive, which we owe to all the individuals of mankind; on the species of injury from which we are under a moral obligation to abstain, whoever he may be whom it is in our power to injure; and on the good which we are under a similar obligation to produce to every one who comes within the sphere of our useful ness.. After the consideration of these general duties, then, I proceed to the class of additional duties which we owe to certain individuals only, with whom we are connected by peculiar ties. These may be considered by us under five heads; as the duties which arise from affinity, from friendship, |