real enjoyment. Unless our young readers determine to practise this self-denial, and to profit by this teaching while they have the opportunity, they will probably have to learn it more effectually under a sterner master, who will come in the shape of disease, and leave behind him the scars of a severe chastisement.

Finally, we would counsel all parents to reflect on this subject. Let the right kind of information relating to health be diffused among our youth. Let suitable books be placed in their hands. Let the laws of health, and attention to the duties concerning the body, form part of their education, and be considered as an important branch of moral teaching; so that they may learn that progress in knowledge and education is of little worth if there be ignorance of those laws, and that it is as much their duty to attend to their bodily health as it is to be honest and truthful and kind.

All animals appear more happy than man. Look, for instance, on yonder ass: all allow him to be miserable. His evils, however, are not brought on by himself: he feels only those which nature has inflicted. We, on the contrary, besides our necessary ills, draw upon ourselves a multitude of others.

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money, and yet for the great benefits of our being, our life, our health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation.

ON SELF-PRESERVATION.

Our time is fix'd, and all our days are numbered;
How long, how short, we know not: this we know,
Duty requires we calmly wait the summons,

Nor dare to stir till Heaven shall give permission.
Those only are the brave who keep their ground,
And keep it to the last. To run away

Is but a coward's trick; to run away
From this world's ills, that at the very most
Will soon blow o'er, thinking to mend ourselves,
By boldly vent'ring on a world unknown,
And plunging headlong in the dark, 'tis mad;
No frenzy half so desperate as this.

AMONG others the youthful reader must have observed the little value which some persons attach to human life. Our newspapers are daily recording instances in which men, and in some cases even youths, commit the awful crime of suicide. Unhappily, this fearful crime appears to be on the increase; and, therefore, it becomes our duty not to overlook the subject in our instruction; for, surely, with such facts before us, instruction must be needed. One is apt to imagine, in reflecting on these things, that the perpetrators of such deeds have never regarded themselves as human beings responsible to God for the gift of life, and that to rush into His presence unbidden, by destroying that life, they are committing one of the most

flagrant of sins. Human life is bestowed by the Creator for wise and holy purposes, and should be regarded by all as a sacred trust, for the use of which all will have to give an

account.

Suicide is a wickedness which, though it must raise the most lively compassion, or rather the most exquisite sorrow, is yet the object not only of disapprobation but of horror; and if it be the effect of intemperance, atheism, gaming, disappointment in any unjustifiable pursuit, or dissatisfaction with the dispensations of Providence, it is of all enormities the most unnatural and atrocious, being, with respect to God, an act of the most presumptuous impiety, precluding, if the death be sudden, repentance and, consequently, the hope of pardon; with respect to dependants and friends most cruel and ungenerous, and with respect to the perpetrator cowardly in the extreme. It is, indeed, so shocking to nature, that we can hardly conceive it possible for any person in his perfect mind to be guilty of it. And our laws are willing to suppose that in almost all cases it is madness, and cannot take place till man, by losing his reason, ceases to be an accountable being. A suicide has been compared to a soldier on guard deserting his post; but we should rather consider a set of these desperate men who rush on certain death as a body of troops sent out on the forlorn hope. They meet every phase of death,

however horrible, with the utmost resolution: some blow their brains out with a pistol, some expire by poison, some fall on the point of their own swords, and others bleed to death. But this false notion of courage, however noble it may appear to the desperate and abandoned, in reality amounts to no more than the resolution of the highwayman, who shoots himself with his own pistol when he finds it impossible to avoid being taken. All practical means, therefore, should be devised to extirpate such absurd bravery, and to make it appear every way horrible, odious, contemptible, and ridiculous. From reading our public prints, a foreigner might be naturally led to imagine that we are the most lunatic people in the world. Almost every day informs us that the coroner's inquest has sat on the body of some miserable suicide, and brought in their verdict of lunacy. Every man in his sober senses must wish that the most severe laws that could possibly be contrived. were enacted against suicides. This shocking bravado never did prevail among the more delicate and tender sex in our own nation, though history informs us that the Roman ladies were once so infatuated as to throw off the softness of their nature and commit violence on themselves, till the madness was curbed by holding them up to public reproach. The cause of these frequent self-murders amongst us has often been imputed to the peculiar tem

perature of our climate. That our spirits are in some measure influenced by the climate cannot be denied; but surely we are not such mere barometers as to be driven to despair and death by the small degree of gloom that our winter brings with it. If we have not so much sunshine as some countries in the world, we have infinitely more than many others. Our climate exempts us from many diseases to which more Southern nations are naturally subject, and we can never be persuaded that being born in a variable climate is a physical cause sufficient to account for the self-murders among us.

Despair, indeed, is the natural cause of these shocking actions; but this is, in most cases, despair brought on by ambition and extravagance, or dissipation and vice. Ambitious and extravagant men involve themselves in difficulties, and then resort to suicide to deliver them of their lives and their cares, while the lastnamed the depraved and vicious-who spend their time in lewd company, or on race-courses and in gambling-houses, are induced to kill themselves from motives arising from the miseries which they suffer as the effects of their vices. For our part, when we see young men entering on such courses, we cannot help looking on them as entering the path of death, and, in a manner, digging their own graves.