comforts of their age, corporeal debility and mental remorse may well inveigh against such pleasures as vain and futile, and unproductive of lasting satisfaction.  But the pleasures of pure love will bear the contemplation of the most improved reason, and the most exalted virtue.  Perhaps there is scarcely a man who has once experienced the genuine delight of virtuous love, however great his intellectual pleasure may have been, that does not look back to the period as the sunny spot in his whole life, where his imagination loves to bask, which he recollects and contemplates with the fondest regrets, and which he would most wish to live over again.  The superiority of intellectual to sensual pleasures consists rather in their filling up more time, in their having a larger range, and in their being less liable to satiety, than in their being more real and essential.

Intemperance in every enjoyment defeats its own purpose.  A walk in the finest day through the most beautiful country, if pursued too far, ends in pain and fatigue.  The most wholesome and invigorating food, eaten with an unrestrained appetite, produces weakness instead of strength.  Even intellectual pleasures, though certainly less liable than others to satiety, pursued with too little intermission, debilitate the body, and impair the vigour of the mind.  To argue against the reality of these pleasures from their abuse seems to be hardly just.  Morality, according to Mr Godwin, is a calculation of consequences, or, as Archdeacon Paley very justly expresses it, the will of God, as collected from general expediency.  According to either of these definitions, a sensual pleasure not attended with the probability of unhappy consequences does not offend against the laws of morality, and if it be pursued with such a degree of temperance as to leave the most ample room for intellectual attainments, it must undoubtedly add to the sum of pleasurable sensations in life.  Virtuous love, exalted by friendship, seems to be that sort of mixture of sensual and intellectual enjoyment particularly suited to the nature of man, and most powerfully calculated to awaken the sympathies of the soul, and produce the most exquisite gratifications.

Mr Godwin says, in order to shew the evident inferiority of the pleasures of sense, ’Strip the commerce of the sexes of all its attendant circumstances, and it would be generally despised’ (Bk.  I, ch. 5; in the third edition, Vol.  I, pp. 71-72).  He might as well say to a man who admired trees:  strip them of their spreading branches and lovely foliage, and what beauty can you see in a bare pole?  But it was the tree with the branches and foliage, and not without them, that excited admiration.  One feature of an object may be as distinct, and excite as different emotions, from the aggregate as any two things the most remote, as a beautiful woman, and a map of Madagascar.  It is ’the symmetry of person, the vivacity, the voluptuous softness of