another an arm dislocated, a third, a fine woman, her face bruised and irrecoverably disfigured. A bustle ensues. You ap proach at the moment of tumult and distress and are a spectator of the whole! And is there no comfort, think you, to be extracted from the sight? It affords, in truth, a great deal of comfort.-One feels an instinctive sentiment of satisfaction, that the misfortune is not one's own.Even the most tenderly beneficent cannot but indulge some complacent emotion of emulation or pride, at sight of any thing, that in any respect, humbles another, if but for a moment, beneath ourselves.-The surprize of the accident interests our curiosity. What is painful and piteous in it, to the sufferers, soothes our hearts with that self-approbation which ever accompanies the consciousness of virtuous sensibility. We acquire from the sight of the fear, suffering, weakness, and fortitude, a new acquaintance with their varied imagery by which our knowledge of human character and fortunes is necessarily enlarged.There is ever something ludicrously comig --- that intermingles itself with the seriousness and the distress of such a scene:-the rueful looks and odd exclamations of the coachman, the awkwardness of the situations in which the persons fall, the insensibility of some part of the surrounding mob, the droll expressions of sympathy which escape from others of them, the hurry and confusion in which they interpose to give their assistance! Consider, also, what a subject of conversation the accident affords to him who was an eye-witness of it, for all the rest of the day! What consequence does it not give him in every coffee-house or private company, in which he tells the tale? If he be a person otherwise of barren intellect, and slender powers of converse-it rouses him, even for a day or two, to all the importance of a Genius and an Orator-proud and unexpected elevation! Tes. Admirable! Admirable! I must confess, that you have made it out very well! This is a pleasure quite to my own heart. I think that I could, indeed, at any time, participate with you, in this comfort. (C. 4.) Chear. What should you think of the comfort of going to the threatre on the first night of a new play or of a performer of extraordinary fame and expectation,— a SIDDONS, a KEMBLE, a COOKE, or a BETTY!-then, finding-that you have come too late-that all the avenues leading to the threatre are crowded so as to render access impossible-or after forcing way in for a certain length, and being squeezed into the slenderest dimensions of a weasel, being at last fixed, so as to be incapable either to advance or retreat, and all but crushed absolutely to death before the crowd begins to disperse ;-Or, worse still-you will say getting actually into the House, but in a situation too distant to allow a view of the stage, where you now faint with intolerable heat, are now chilled to death by blasts cold as if they bore on their wings all the ices of the frozen Ocean, have your ears rent with ignorant bursts of applause, loud as the wolves on Orca's stormy shore, are now terrified as if by the hisses of myriads of angry cats reinforced with legions of rattle snakes, now shrink from an insurrection to violence terrible as when the earth-born giants heaped mountain upon mountain, and planted their batteries against the Deities of Heaven? Sen. Horrible! Horrible! I once experienced all this! When, even now, I think of it, my very flesh creeps at the remembrance. I can hardly believe myself safe at this moment. It is astonishing to me to think, that I could survive it! Merry. Survive it! Survive it! How came you to be so eager to run yourself into it? How came such crowds of old and young, rich and poor, stout and sickly, males and females, to press themselves into the same situation? With a knowledge, that the house would be almost empty,would any one of all those be so anxious to get, for that night, a seat in it? Is it not the fame of the crowd that contributes the most to augment it? Tell the same multitude separately, that, performers even greater than those I named, are to grace the scene, but that little or no company is to be attracted to see them;-not Garrick, nor Roscius himself from the dead shall have power to draw them together! It is, then, the very crowd, the very difficulty, the very squeezing, the very noise of applauses, the very discord of hisses and disapprobation, that constitutes the grand charm of public entertainments like these. It is a charm adapted to the feelings and the temper of every age. What though death, the fracture of limbs, or disease never afterwards to be subdued, may be the frequent consequence? All joy hovers over the verge of misfortune. Man delights to pursue his pleasures to those extreme limits at which they border on suffering. The misfortune is accident;the joy, the comfort is of the essential nature of the thing!-Men have died of laughing; some, amidst the joys of a wedding night; others of the ecstacy of recovered liberty; others, of the satisfaction which has been shed over their minds upon learning, that a wife, a husband, or a child supposed to have been lost, still lived in health and to their wishes. But, |