shy off from any similar confidence as to their own affairs:  also those individuals who borrow small sums of money and never repay them, but go on borrowing till the small sums amount to a good deal.  To the same class may be referred the persona who lay themselves out for saying disagreeable things, the “candid friends” of Canning, the “people who speak their mind,” who form such pests of society.  To find fault is to right-feeling men a very painful thing; but some take to the work with avidity and delight.  And while people of cultivation shrink, with a delicate intuition, from saying any thing which may give pain or cause uneasiness to others, there are others who are ever painfully treading upon the moral corns of all around them.  Sometimes this is done designedly:  as by Mr. Snarling, who by long practice has attained the power of hinting and insinuating, in the course of a forenoon call, as many unpleasant things as may germinate into a crop of ill-tempers and worries which shall make the house at which he called uncomfortable all that day.  Sometimes it is done unawares, as by Mr. Boor, who, through pure ignorance and coarseness, is always bellowing out things which it is disagreeable to some one, or to several, to hear.  Which was it, I wonder, Boor or Snarling, who once reached the dignity of the mitre, and who at prayers in his house uttered this supplication on behalf of a lady visitor who was kneeling beside him:  “Bless our friend, Mrs. ——­:  give her a little more common sense; and teach her to dress a little less like a tragedy queen than she does at present”?

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But who shall reckon up the countless circumstances which lie like a depressing burden on the energies of men, and make them work at that disadvantage which we have thought of under the figure of carrying weight in life? There are men who carry weight in a damp, marshy neighborhood, who, amid bracing mountain air might have done things which now they will never do.  There are men who carry weight in an uncomfortable house:  in smoky chimneys:  in a study with a dismal look-out:  in distance from a railway-station:  in ten miles between them and a bookseller’s shop.  Give another hundred a year of income, and the poor struggling parson who preaches dull sermons will astonish you by the talent he will exhibit when his mind is freed from the dismal depressing influence of ceaseless scheming to keep the wolf from the door.  Let the poor little sick child grow strong and well, and with how much better heart will its father face the work of life!  Let the clergyman who preached, in a spiritless enough way, to a handful of uneducated rustics, be placed in a charge where weekly he has to address a large cultivated congregation, and, with the new stimulus, latent powers may manifest themselves which no one fancied he possessed, and he may prove quite an eloquent and attractive preacher.  A dull, quiet man, whom you esteemed as a blockhead, may suddenly be valued