Southey’s Cottonian Library was all quite right; and you would have said that the books were very nicely bound, considering; for Southey could not afford to pay the regular binder’s charges; and it was better that his books should be done up in cotton of various hues by the members of his own family than that they should remain not bound at all.  You will think, too, of the poor old parson who wrote a book which he thought of great value, but which no publisher would bring out.  He was determined that all his labor should not be lost to posterity.  So he bought types and a printing-press, and printed his precious work, poor man:  he and his man-servant did it all.  It made a great many volumes; and the task took up many years.  Then he bound the volumes with his own hands; and carrying them to London, he placed a copy of his work in each of the public libraries.  I dare say he might have saved himself his labor.  How many of my readers could tell what was the title of the work, or what was the name of its author?  Still, there was a man who accomplished his design, in the face of every disadvantage.

There is a great point of difference between our feeling towards the human being who runs his race much overweighted and our feeling towards the inferior animal that does the like.  If you saw a poor horse gamely struggling in a race, with a weight of a ton extra, you would pity it.  Your sympathies would all be with the creature that was making the best of unfavorable circumstances.  But it is a sorrowful fact, that the drag-weight of human beings not unfrequently consists of things which make us angry rather than sympathetic.  You have seen a man carrying heavy weight in life, perhaps in the form of inveterate wrong-headedness and suspiciousness; but instead of pitying him, our impulse would rather be to beat him upon that perverted head.  We pity physical malformation or unhealthiness; but our bent is to be angry with intellectual and moral malformation or unhealthiness.  We feel for the deformed man, who must struggle on at that sad disadvantage; feeling it, too, much more acutely than you would readily believe.  But we have only indignation for the man weighted with far worse things, and things which, in some cases at least, he can just as little help.  You have known men whose extra pounds, or even extra ton, was a hasty temper, flying out of a sudden into ungovernable bursts:  or a moral cowardice leading to trickery and falsehood:  or a special disposition to envy and evil-speaking:  or a very strong tendency to morbid complaining about their misfortunes and troubles:  or an invincible bent to be always talking of their sufferings through the derangement of their digestive organs.  Now, you grow angry at these things.  You cannot stand them.  And there is a substratum of truth to that angry feeling.  A man can form his mind more than he can form his body.  If a man be well-made, physically, he will, in ordinary cases, remain so:  but he may,