that morbid condition, you would know that there is more reason to mourn over it than to laugh at it.  There is acute misery felt now and then; and there is a pervading, never-departing sense of the hollowness of the morbid mirth.  It is but a very few degrees better than “moody madness, laughing wild, amid severest woe.”  By depression of spirits I understand a dejection without any cause that could be stated, or from causes which in a healthy mind would produce no such degree of dejection.  No doubt, many men can remember seasons of dejection which was not imaginary, and of anxiety and misery whose causes were only too real.  You can remember, perhaps, the dark time in which you knew quite well what it was that made it so dark.  Well, better days have come.  That sorrowful, wearing time, which exhausted the springs of life faster than ordinary living would have done, which aged you in heart and frame before your day, dragged over, and it is gone.  You carried heavy weight, indeed, while it lasted.  It was but poor running you made, poor work you did, with that feeble, anxious, disappointed, miserable heart.  And you would many a time have been thankful to creep into a quiet grave.  Perhaps that season did you good.  Perhaps it was the discipline you needed.  Perhaps it took out your self-conceit, and made you humble.  Perhaps it disposed you to feel for the griefs and cares of others, and made you sympathetic.  Perhaps, looking back now, you can discern the end it served.  And now that it has done its work, and that it only stings you when you look back, let that time be quite forgotten!

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There are men, and very clever men, who do the work of life at a disadvantage, through this, that their mind is a machine fitted for doing well only one kind of work,—­or that their mind is a machine which, though doing many things well, does some one thing, perhaps a conspicuous thing, very poorly.  You find it hard to give a man credit for being possessed of sense and talent, if you hear him make a speech at a public dinner, which speech approaches the idiotic for its silliness and confusion.  And the vulgar mind readily concludes that he who does one thing extremely ill can do nothing well, and that he who is ignorant on one point is ignorant on all.  A friend of mine, a country parson, on first going to his parish, resolved to farm his glebe for himself.  A neighboring farmer kindly offered the parson to plough one of his fields.  The farmer said that he would send his man John with a plough and a pair of horses, on a certain day.  “If ye’re goin’ about,” said the farmer to the clergyman, “John will be unco’ weel pleased, if you speak to him, and say it’s a fine day, or the like o’ that; but dinna,” said the farmer, with much solemnity, “dinna say onything to him aboot ploughin’ and sawin’; for John,” he added, “is a stupid body, but he has been ploughin’ and sawin’ all his life, and he’ll see in a minute that ye