pleasant about it. 'Feelings which, as soon as they pass a certain limit, are inexpressibly painful, diffuse a certain gentle and pleasurable glow when they are only just strong enough to excite our attention." The power of feeling very keenly for distant and invisible misery is to be regarded as one of the latest of endowments; and such a power developed in any high degree has been pronounced a sufficient qualification for saintship of no mean order. The truth involved in Rochefoucauld's maxim is recognised on good authority as much too unpleasant to be glossed over by any ingenuity of speculation: the case of which the French duke was thinking seems to have been, that "dirty grain of jealousy" of which it is so difficult to get rid; and the misfortunes which really give us pleasure are those which flatter our vanity in a way which we are ashamed to confess ;- —as where a strong man is taken ill, and we can't quite refrain from congratulating ourselves on the strength of our constitution; or a rich man loses money, and we feel a little happier in the thought that he was not so much shrewder than ourselves in his speculations. "The people whom we know best are those whose competition we have most reason to dread; and we are therefore apt to indulge, when they meet with any misfortune, in that peculiar variety of laughter which Hobbes mistook for the whole species, and which may without paradox be described as a 'sudden glory,' or a flash of perception of our own superiority." M. CuvillierFleury speaks of that law of the human heart “qui nous fait prendre plaisir au spectacle et au récit des souffrances d'autrui, surtout quand elles sont risibles." L'homme se plaît à voir les maux qu'il ne sent pas. All men, Sir Walter Scott professes to believe, enjoy an ill-natured joke: the difference is, that an ill-natured person can drink out to the very dregs the amusement which it affords, while the better-moulded mind soon loses the sense of the ridiculous, in sympathy for the pain of the sufferer. We read of Lisa, in Emilia Wyndham, that when certain bad news reached her-of a sort which common minds always seem to spread with particular pleasure, while with many groans and lamentations they take care to exaggerate

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it, she, on the contrary, would not believe it, declared it to be an infamous falsehood; and after pouring forth several feminine reasons for incredulity, she fell into a passion, and quarrelled with every person who took pains to undeceive her : "she was one who belied the maxim of La Rochefoucauld-there was something in the misfortunes of her friends altogether painful to her." Sir Walter quotes the Duke's maxim in the Heart of Mid-Lothian, as that of an author who has torn the veil from many foul gangrenes of the human heart; and he exemplifies it in the case of fussy, meddlesome, Mr. Saddletree, who would have been angry if told that he felt pleasure in the disaster of poor Effie Deans and the disgrace of her family; and yet there is great question whether the gratification of playing the person of importance, and laying down the law on the whole affair, did not offer, to say the least, full consolation for the pain which pure sympathy gave him on account of his wife's kinswoman.

:

Madame du Deffand uttered what she would herself have called a mot terrible, after the manner of La Rochefoucauld, when she said that there exists not a single human being to whom one can confide one's griefs without affording him a maligne joie. Malignity is the very word by which Dr. South designates the "unaccountable" disposition some persons have, -he says not, all persons, to exult in news of a neighbour's ill they find an "inward secret rejoicing," as he expresses it, in themselves, when they see or hear of the loss or calamity of a neighbour, though no imaginable interest or advantage of their own is or can be served thereby. "But it seems there is a base, wolfish principle within, that is fed and gratified with another's misery; and no other account or reason in the world can be given of its being so, but that it is the nature of the beast to delight in such things." A poet paraphrases and improves upon the Frenchman's text:

"In his desolate Maxims, La Rochefoucauld wrote,

'In the grief or mischance of a friend you may note
There is something which always gives pleasure.' Alas!
That reflection fell short of the truth as it was.

La Rochefoucauld might have as truly set down—
'No misfortune but what some one turns to his own
Advantage its mischief; no sorrow, but of it
There ever is somebody ready to profit:
No affliction without its stock-jobbers, who all
Gamble, speculate, play on the rise and the fall
Of another man's heart, and make traffic in it.'

Burn thy book, O La Rochefoucauld -Fool! one man's wit
All men's selfishness how should it fathom? O sage,
Dost thou satirize Nature ?-She laughs at thy page."

ASKING AMISS.

ST. JAMES iv. 3.

I so is corollary

F there is apostolic warrant for the assertion that not to

that not to have may sometimes be due to having asked amiss. "Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss”—ask in an earthly spirit, and with aims and objects of the earth, earthy. Ask amiss, as if anything might be asked for that one fancies, and as if it were of course to be had for the asking-something to pamper the flesh, for instance, to satisfy the desire of the eye, to be enjoyed in exclusively a worldly sense, to be consumed upon one's pleasures : ἵνα ἐν ταῖς ἡδοναῖς ὑμῶν δαπανήσητε.

Many men, says Jeremy Taylor, pray in the flesh, when they pretend they pray in the Spirit. Some, he says, think it is enough in all instances if they pray hugely and fervently; and that it is religion impatiently to desire some earthly advantage or convenience, an heir to be born, or a foe to be foiled: "They call it holy, so they desire it in prayer." In Jonson's comedy, Fungoso is positively devout in his aspirations after a new suit, to match that worn by Fastidious Brisk: might he but have his wish, he'd ask no more of Heaven now, but such a suit, doublet and hose and hat included; "Send me good luck, Lord, an't be Thy will, prosper it!" Equally typical is the Scotchman's prayer for a modest competency,—“ And, that

ABUSED EXERCISE OF PRAYER.

431

there may be no mistake, let it be seven hundred a year paid quarterly in advance." Lady Castletowers, in the novel, when she joins in the prayer put up at church, towards the end of the service, which implores fulfilment for the desires and petitions of the congregation, "as may be most expedient for them," invariably reverts in the silence of her thoughts to a marquis's coronet on the carriage panels, to the four pearls and the four strawberry leaves: nor ever asks herself if there can be profanity in the prayer. The author of La Religion Naturelle discusses what things may with propriety be asked of Heaven; and among such as may not, he sets down anything of an immoral kind, since it is a direct offence to Heaven to even conceive a desire contre l'honnêteté; also, demands of a frivolous character; supplications such as, Grant that this pear may ripen, or, that this lawsuit may be successful; nor can it be conceded that one may petition the Almighty for things one would blush to ask of an earthly friend. What may be called the logic of prayer in this respect is pithily put in the collect for the tenth Sunday after Trinity; "Let Thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of Thy humble servants; and that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please Thee."

Contre l'honnêteté, saving the reverence due to the Holy Father as such, may surely be accounted,-by Protestants at least, and of Teutonic lineage,—the "curious thing," as Mr. Carlyle calls it, done by the Pope in 1729, on occasion of a growing estrangement between England and Prussia. "The Pope, having prayed lately for rain and got it, proceeds now to pray, or even do a Public Mass, or some other

so-called Pontificality,

prays, namely, that Heaven would be graciously pleased to foment, and blow up to the proper degree, this quarrel between the two chief Heretic Powers, Heaven's chief enemies, whereby Holy Religion might reap a good benefit, if it pleased Heaven.” *

* "But, this time, the miracle did not [as in the case of the rain] go off according to program."-History of Frederick the Great, vol. ii., p. 97.

The rapacious and unscrupulous governor, De Hagenbach, in Scott's Anne of Geierstein, is rebuked by his father confessor for desiring his kind prayers and intercession with Our Lady and the saints, “in some transactions which are likely to occur this morning, and in which, as the Lombard says, I do espy roba di guadagno,”—the desiderated prayers being, in fact, simply for the success of pillage and robbery. In The Pirate, Bryce the pedlar, enriched by the ill wind that blows him good in the shape of a wreck, is unfailing in his expression of grateful thanks to Heaven for such mercies, *—not without hope that the cultivation of this devout spirit may bring a blessing on him and his, and "mair wrecks ere winter."+ Thought worthy of permanent record in Mr. Irving's Annals of our Time, is the case of the convicted swindler who called himself Sir Richard Douglas, and whose diary was put in evidence against him and his two sons at the Central Criminal Court, to prove the extensive scale and methodical system of his cheating transactions; in which diary the first day of the new year opened with a prayer, asking Providence to bless the exertions of the writer and his sons, and make them more prosperous than in the year before. Utterly beyond his apprehension, or comprehension, would have been the too subtle point in Hartley Coleridge's sonnet on Prayer,—

"But if for any wish thou darest not pray,

Then pray to God to cast that wish away.”

Brother Prince's Journal some years ago supplied the reviewers with matter for notes of exclamation, where he makes out Heaven as interposing, for instance, in one case to cure him of a toothache, in another to secure him an inside seat in a chaise, in a third to secure him a prize in Euclid. So again,

* A costermonger told a city missionary, that if he ever prayed, it was for a hard winter and plenty of wild ducks.

+ Sir Walter has a story of a Zetlander who met a remark of surprise at his having such old sails to his boat, with the reply, in reference to a then recently erected lighthouse on the Isle of Sanda," Had it been His will that light had not been placed yonder, I would have had enough of new sails last winter."