“------------It was well said,
And ’tis a kind of good deed to say well.”

But heroes on paper might degenerate into vagabonds in practice, Corinnas into courtezans.  Thus a refined and permanent individual attachment is intended to supply the place and avoid the inconveniences of marriage; but vows of eternal constancy, without church security, are found to be fragile.  A member of the ideal and perfect commonwealth of letters lends another a hundred pounds for immediate and pressing use; and when he applies for it again, the borrower has still more need of it than he, and retains it for his own especial, which is tantamount to the public good.  The Exchequer of pure reason, like that of the State, never refunds.  The political as well as the religious fanatic appeals from the over-weening opinion and claims of others to the highest and most impartial tribunal, namely, his own breast.  Two persons agree to live together in Chambers on principles of pure equality and mutual assistance—­but when it comes to the push, one of them finds that the other always insists on his fetching water from the pump in Hare-court, and cleaning his shoes for him.  A modest assurance was not the least indispensable virtue in the new perfectibility code; and it was hence discovered to be a scheme, like other schemes where there are all prizes and no blanks, for the accommodation of the enterprizing and cunning, at the expence of the credulous and honest.  This broke up the system, and left no good odour behind it!  Reason has become a sort of bye-word, and philosophy has “fallen first into a fasting, then into a sadness, then into a decline, and last, into the dissolution of which we all complain!” This is a worse error than the former:  we may be said to have “lost the immortal part of ourselves, and what remains is beastly!” The point of view from which this matter may be fairly considered, is two-fold, and may be stated thus:—­In the first place, it by no means follows, because reason is found not to be the only infallible or safe rule of conduct, that it is no rule at all; or that we are to discard it altogether with derision and ignominy.  On the contrary, if not the sole, it is the principal ground of action; it is “the guide, the stay and anchor of our purest thoughts, and soul of all our moral being.”  In proportion as we strengthen and expand this principle, and bring our affections and subordinate, but perhaps more powerful motives of action into harmony with it, it will not admit of a doubt that we advance to the goal of perfection, and answer the ends of our creation, those ends which not only morality enjoins, but which religion sanctions.  If with the utmost stretch of reason, man cannot (as some seemed inclined to suppose) soar up to the God, and quit the ground of human frailty, yet, stripped wholly of it, he sinks at once into the brute.  If it cannot stand alone, in its naked simplicity, but requires other props to buttress it up, or ornaments