outlines of character, which experience does not finish.  Friends, like certain flowers, bloom around us in the sunshine of success; but at night-fall or at the approach of storms, they shut up their hearts; and thus, poor victims being rifled of their mind’s content, with their little string of enjoyments broken up for ever, are abandoned to the pity or scorn of bystanders.  It is impossible to reflect for a moment on such a crisis, without dropping a tear for the self-created infirmities of man:  but there are considerations at which he shudders, and which he would rather varnish over with the sophistry of his refinement, and the fallacies of self-conceit.

I fear that I am breaking my rule in not confining myself to a few shades of debt and conscience, with a view of determining how far they are usually reconciled among us.  The task may not prove altogether fruitless; notwithstanding, to find honest men, would require the lantern of Diogenes, and perhaps turn out like Gratiano’s wheat.

In our youthful days, we all remember to have read a pithy string of Maxims by Dr. Franklin; and we are accustomed to admire the pertinence of their wit,—­but here their influence too often terminates.  Since Franklin’s time, the practice of getting into debt has become more and more easy, notwithstanding men have become more wary.  Goldsmith, too, gives us a true picture of this habit in his scene with Mr. Padusoy, the mercer, a mode which has been found to succeed so well since his time, that, with the exception of a few short-cuts by sharpers and other proscribed gentry, little amendment has been made.  Profuseness on the part of the debtor will generally be found to beget confidence on that of the creditor; and, in like manner, diffidence will create mistrust, and mistrust an entire overthrow of the scheme.  An unblushing front, and the gift of non chalance, are therefore the best qualifications for a debtor to obtain credit, while poor modesty will be starved in her own littleness.  In vain has Juvenal protested—­“Fronti nulla fides;” and have the world been amused with anecdotes of paupers dying with money sewed up in their clothes:  appearance and assumed habits are still the handmaids to confidence; and so long as this system exists, the warfare of debtor and creditor will be continued.  Procrastination will be found to be another furtherance of the system, inasmuch as it is too evident throughout life that men are more apt to take pleasure “by the forelock,” than to calculate its consequence.  In this manner, men of irregular habits anticipate and forestal every hour of their lives, and pleasure and pain alternate, till pain, like debt, accumulates, and sinks its patient below the level of the world.  Economy and forecast do not enter into the composition of such men, nor are such lessons often felt or acknowledged, till custom has rendered the heart unfit for the reception of their counsels.  It is too frequently that the