business for their sake, is he not an industrious man; or has he not the virtue of industry? I might in like manner instance in all the rest of the virtues; but, to make the thing short, as it is certain that the more we strive against the temptation to any vice, and practise the contrary virtue, the weaker will that temptation be, and the stronger will be that habit, till at length the temptation hath no force, or entirely vanishes, does it follow from thence that in our endeavors to overcome vice we grow continually less and less virtuous, till at length we have no virtue at all? If self-denial be the essence of virtue, then it follows that the man who is naturally temperate, just, &c., is not virtuous, but that, in order to be virtuous, he must, in spite of his natural inclinations, wrong his neighbors, and eat and drink, &c., to excess. But perhaps it may be said, by the word virtue, in the above assertion, is meant merit, and so it should stand; thus without self-denial there is no merit, and the greater the self-denial the greater the merit. The self-denial here meant must be when our inclinations are towards vice, or else it would still be nonsense. By merit is understood desert; and when we say a man merits, we mean that he deserves praise or reward. We do not pretend to merit anything of God; for he is above our service, and the benefits he confers on us are the effects of his goodness and bounty. All our merit, then, is with regard to one another, and from one to another. Taking, then, the proposition as it stands : If a man does me a service from a natural benevolent inclination, does he deserve less of me than another who does me the like kindness against his inclination? If I have two journeymen, one naturally industrious, the other idle, but both perform a day's work equally good, ought I to give the latter the most wages? Indeed, lazy workmen are commonly observed to be more extravagant in their demands than the industrious; for, if they have not more for their work, they cannot live as well as the industrious. But, though it be true to a proverb that lazy folks take the most pains, does it follow that they deserve the most money? If you were to employ servants in affairs of trust, would you pay more wages to one you knew was naturally honest, than for one naturally roguish, but who had lately acted honestly; for currents whose natural channels are dammed up, till a new course is by time worn sufficiently deep, and become natural, are apt to break their banks. If one servant is more valuable than another, has he not more merit than the other? and yet this is not on account of superior self-denial. Is a patriot not praiseworthy, if public spirit is natural to him? Is a pacing horse less valuable for being a natural pacer? Nor, in my opinion, has any man less merit for having in general naturally virtuous inclinations. The truth is, that temperance, justice, charity, &c., are virtues whether practised with or against our inclinations; and the man who practises them merits our love and esteem; and self-denial is neither good nor bad, but as it is applied. He that denies a vicious inclination is virtuous in proportion to his resolution; but the most perfect virtue is above all temptation, such as the virtue of the saints in heaven: and he who does any foolish, indecent, or wicked thing, merely because it is contrary to his inclination, like some mad enthusiasts I have read of, who ran about in public naked under the notion of taking up the cross, is not practising the reasonable science of virtue, but is lunatic. Newcastle, February 5. [From Poor Richard's Almanac, 1742.] RIVALSHIP IN ALMANAC-MAKING. COURTEOUS READER: This is the ninth year of my endeavors to serve thee in the capacity of a calendar-writer. The encouragement I have met with must be ascribed, in a great measure, to your charity, excited by the open, honest declaration I made of my poverty at my first appearance. This my brother Philomaths could, without being conjurers, discover; and Poor Richard's success has produced ye a Poor Will, and a Poor Robin; and, no doubt, Poor John, &c., will follow, and we shall all be, in name, what some folks say we are already in fact, a parcel of poor almanac-makers. During the course of these nine years, what buffetings have I not sustained! The fraternity have been all in arms. Honest Titan, deceased, was raised, and made to abuse his old friend. Both authors and printers were angry. Hard names, and many, were bestowed on me. They denied me to be the author of my own works; declared there never was any such person; asserted that I was dead sixty years ago; prognosticated my death to happen within a twelvemonth; with many other malicious incon sistencies, the effects of blind passion, envy at my success, and a vain hope of depriving me, dear reader, of thy wonted countenance and favor. Who knows him? they cry: Where does he live? But what is that to them? If I delight in a private life, have they any right to drag me out of my retirement? I have good reason for concealing the place of my abode. It is time for an old man, as I am, to think of preparing for his great remove. The perpetual teasing of both neighbors and strangers, to calculate nativities, give judgments on schemes, and erect figures, discover thieves, detect horse-dealers, describe the route of runaways and strayed cattle; the crowd of visitors with a thousand trifling questions,— Will my ship return safe? Will my mare win the race? Will her next colt be a pacer? ? When will my wife die? Who shall be my husband? And HOW LONG first? When is the best time to cut hair, trim cocks or sow salad? - these and the like impertinences I have now neither taste nor leisure for. I have had enough of them. All that these angry folks can say will never provoke me to tell them where I live I would eat my nails first. My last adversary is J. Jn, philomat, who declares and protests (in his preface, 1741) that the false prophecy put in my almanac concerning him, the year before, is altogether false and untrue, and that I am one of Baal's false prophets. This false, false prophecy he speaks of, related to his reconciliation with the Church of Rome; which, notwithstanding his declaring and protesting, is, I fear, too true. Two things in his elegiac verses confirm me in this suspicion. He calls the first of November AllHallows day. Reader, does not this smell of popery? Does it in the least savor of the pure language of Friends? But the plainest thing is, his adoration of saints, which he confesses to be his practice, in these words, page 4: "When any trouble did me befall, To my dear Mary then I would call." Did he think the whole world were so stupid as not to take notice of this? So ignorant as not to know that all Catholics pay the highest regard to the Virgin Mary? Ah! friend John, we must allow you to be a poet, but you are certainly no Protestant. I could heartily wish your religion was as good as your verses. RICHARD SAUNDERS. THE WASTE OF LIFE. ANERGUS was a gentleman of a good estate; he was bred to no business, and could not contrive how to waste his hours agreeably. He had no relish for any of the proper works of life, nor any taste at all for the improvements of the mind; he spent generally ten hours of the four-and-twenty in his bed; he dozed away two or three more on his couch, and as many were dissolved in good liquor every evening, if he met with company of his own humor. Five or six of the next he sauntered away with much indolence: the chief business of them was to contrive his meals, and to feed his fancy beforehand with the promise of a dinner and supper; not that he was so very a glutton, or so entirely devoted to appetite; but chiefly because he knew not how to employ his thoughts better, he let them rove about the sustenance of his body. Thus he haa made a shift to wear off ten years since the paternal estate fell into his hands; and yet, according to the abuse of words in our day, he was called a man of virtue, because he was scarce ever known to be quite drunk, nor was his nature much inclined to lewdness. One evening, as he was musing along, his thoughts happened to take a most unusual turn; for they cast a glance backward, and began to reflect on his manner of life. He bethought himself what a number of living beings had been made a sacrifice to support his carcass, and how much corn and wine had been mingled with those offerings. He had not quite lost all the arithmetic that he learned when he was a boy, and he set himself to compute what he had devoured since he came to the age of man. "About a dozen feathered creatures, small and great, have, one week with another," said he, "given up their lives to prolong mine, which in ten years amounts to at least six thousand. 66 Fifty sheep have been sacrificed in a year, with half a hecatomb of black cattle, that I might have the choicest part offered weekly upon my table. Thus a thousand beasts out of the flock and the herd have been slain in ten years' time to feed me, besides what the forest has supplied me with. Many hundreds of fishes have, in all their varieties, been robbed of life for my repast, and of the smaller fry as many thousands. "A measure of corn would hardly afford fine flour enough for a month's provision, and this arises to above six score bushels; and many hogsheads of ale and wine, and other liquors, have passed through this body of mine, this wretched strainer of meat and drink. "And what have I done, all this time, for God or man? What a vast profusion of good things upon an useless life and a worthless liver! There is not the meanest creature among all these which I have devoured but hath answered the end of its creation better than I. It was made to support human nature, and it hath done so. Every crab and oyster I have eat, and every grain of corn I have devoured, hath filled up its place in the rank of beings with more propriety and honor than I have done. O, shameful waste of life and time! In short, he carried on his moral reflections with so just and severe a force of reason, as constrained him to change his whole course of life, to break off his follies at once, and to apply himself to gain some useful knowledge, when he was more than thirty years of age; he lived many following years, with the character of a worthy man, and an excellent Christian; he performed the kind offices of a good neighbor at home, and made a shining figure as a patriot in the senate-house; he died with a peaceful conscience, and the tears of his country were dropped upon his tomb. The world, that knew the whole series of his life, stood amazed at the mighty change. They beheld him as a wonder of reformation, while he himself confessed and adored the divine power and mercy, which had transformed him from a brute to a man. But this was a single instance; and we may almost venture to write MIRACLE upon it. Are there not numbers of both sexes, among our young gentry, in this degenerate age, whose lives thus run to utter waste, without the least tendency to usefulness? When I meet with persons of such a worthless character as this, it brings to my mind some scraps of Horace : "Nos numerus sumus, et fruges consumere nati. -Alcinoique Juventus Cui pulchrum fuit in Medios dormire dies," &c. PARAPHRASE. "There are a number of us creep Though crows and ravens do the same, Ravens or crows might fill their places, Then, if their tomb-stone, when they die, Than that they 've eat up all their bread, |