whom he formed an acquaintance that might have ripened into intimacy, if their lots had fallen near to each other in after life. This was Thomas Dickson, a native of Dumfries; they attended the same lectures, and consorted on terms of friendly familiarity. But when their University course is completed men separate, like stage-coach travellers at the end of a journey, or fellow passengers in a ship when they reach their port. While Dove "pursued the noiseless tenor of his way" at Doncaster, Dickson tried his fortune in the metropolis, where he became Physician to the London Hospital, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He died in the year 1784, and is said in his epitaph to have been "a man of singular probity, loyalty and humanity; kind to his relations, beloved by all who knew him, learned and skilful in his profession. Unfeed by the poor, he lived to do good, and died a christian believer." For awhile some intercourse between him and the Doctor had been kept up by letters; but the intervals in their correspondence became longer and longer as each grew more engaged in business; and

new connections gradually effaced an impression which had not been made early, nor had ever been very deep. The friendship that with no intercourse to nourish it, keeps itself alive for years, must have strong roots in a good soil.

Cowper regarded these early connections in an unfavourable and melancholy mood. "For my own part," says he, "I found such friendships, though warm enough in their commencement, surprisingly liable to extinction; and of seven or eight whom I had selected for intimates out of about three hundred, in ten years time not one was left me. The truth is that there may be, and often is, an attachment of one boy to another, that looks very like a friendship; and while they are in circumstances that enable them mutually to oblige and to assist each other, promises well and bids fair to be lasting. But they are no sooner separated from each other, by entering into the world at large, than other connexions and new employments in which they no longer share together, efface the remembrance of what passed in earlier days, and

they become strangers to each other for ever. Add to this the man frequently differs so much from the boy,-his principles, manners, temper, and conduct, undergo so great an alteration,— that we no longer recognise in him our old playfellow, but find him utterly unworthy and unfit for the place he once held in our affections." These sentiments he has also expressed in

school-friendships are not always found,

Though fair in promise, permanent and sound;
The most disinterested and virtuous minds,

In early years connected, time unbinds;

New situations give a different cast

Of habit, inclination, temper, taste;

And he that seem'd our counterpart at first,

Soon shews the strong similitude reversed.

Young heads are giddy, and young hearts are warm,

And make mistakes for manhood to reform.

Boys are, at best, but pretty buds unblown,

Whose scent and hues are rather guessed than known;
Each dreams that each is just what he appears,

But learns his error in maturer years,

When disposition, like a sail unfurled,

Shews all its rents and patches to the world. Disposition however is the one thing which undergoes no other change than that of growth in after life. The physical constitution, when any

morbid principle is innate in it, rarely alters; the moral constitution-(except by a miracle of God's mercy,) never.

ἀνθρώποις δ ̓ ἀεὶ

Ὁ μὲν πονηρὸς, οὐδὲν ἄλλο πλὴν κακὸς.* "Believe if you will," say the Persians, "that a mountain has removed from one place to another, but if you are told that a man has changed his nature, believe it not!"

The best of us have but too much cause for making it part of our daily prayer that we fall into no sin! But there is an original pravity which deserves to be so called in the darkest import of the term,-an inborn and incurable disease of the moral being, manifested as soon as it has strength to show itself; and wherever this is perceived in earliest youth, it may too surely be predicted what is to be expected when all controul of discipline is removed. Of those that bring with them such a disposition into the world, it cannot be said that they fall into sin, because it is too manifest that they seek and pursue it as the bent of their nature. No wonder that wild theories have * EURIPIDES.

been devised to account for what is so mysterious, so aweful, and yet so incontestable ! Zephaniah Holwell, who will always be remembered for his sufferings in the Black Hole, wrote a strange book in which he endeavoured to prove that men were fallen angels, that is, that human bodies are the forms in which fallen angels are condemned to suffer for the sins which they have committed in their former state. Akin to this is the Jewish fancy, held by Josephus, as well as his less liberalized countrymen, that the souls of wicked men deceased, got into the bodies of the living and possessed them; and by this agency they accounted for all diseases. Holwell's theory is no doubt as old as any part of the Oriental systems of philosophy and figments; it is one of the many vain attempts to account for that fallen nature of which every man who is sincere enough to look into his own heart, finds there what may too truly be called an indwelling witness. Something like the Jewish notion was held by John Wesley and Adam Clarke; and there are certain cases in which it is difficult not