wind. I look back on my past life, and but for some memorials of guilt and infamy, it is all a blank-a perfect vacancy! I might have grazed with the beasts of the field, or sung with the winged inhabitants in the woods to much better purpose, than any for which I have lived. And oh! but for some faint hope, a thousand times more blessed had I been, to have slept with the clods of the valley, and never heard, the Almighty's fiat, nor waked into life at his command!

I never had a just apprehension of the solemnity of the part I am to act till now. I have often met death insulting on the hostile plain, and, with a stupid boast, defied his terrors: with a courage as brutal as that of the warlike horse, I have rushed into the field of battle, laughed at the glit-1 tering spear, and rejoiced at the sound of the trumpet; nor had a thought of any state beyond the grave, nor the great tribunal to which I must have been summoned ;

"Where all my secret guilt had been reveal'd, Nor the minutest circumstance conceal'd."

It is this which arms death with all its terrors; else I could still mock at fear, and smile in the face of the gloomy monarch. It is not giving up my breath; it is not being

forever insensible, that is the thought at which I shrink: it is the terrible hereafter, the something beyond the grave at which I recoil. Those great realities, which, in the hours of mirth and vanity, I have treated as phanthoms, as the idle dreams of superstitious beings; these start forth, and dare me now in their most terrible demonstration. My awakened conscience feels something of that eternal vengeance I have often defied.

To what heights of madness is it possible for human nature to reach? What extravagance is it to jest with death! to laugh at damnation! to sport with eternal chains, and recreate a jovial fancy with the scenes of infernal misery!

Were there no impiety in this kind of mirth, it would be as ill-bred as to entertain a dying friend with the sight of a harlequin, or the rehearsal of a farce. Every thing in nature seems to reproach this levity in human creatures. The whole creation, man excepted, is serious: man, who has the highest reason to be so, while his affairs of infinite consequence are depending on this short uncertain duration. A condemned wretch may with as good a grace go dancing to his execution, as the greatest part of. mankind go on with such a thoughtless gayety to their grave.

Oh! with what horror do I recall those hours of vanity which we have wasted together! Retura, ye lost neglected moments! How should I prize you above the Eastern treasures! Let me dwell with hermits; let me rest on the cold earth; let me converse in cottages; may I but once more stand a candidate for an immortal crown, and have my probation for celestial happiness.

Ye vain grandeurs of a court! Ye sounding titles, and perishing riches! what do ye now signify! what consolation, what relief can ye give me ? I have a splendid passage to the grave; I die in state, and languish under a gilded canopy; I am expiring on soft and downy pillows, and am respectfully attended by my servants and physicians: my dependents sigh, my sisters weep, my father bends beneath a load of years and grief; my lovely wife pale and silent, conceals her inward anguish; my friend, who was as my own soul, suppresses his sighs, and leaves me to his secret grief. But, oh! who of these will answer my summons at the high tribunal? Who of them will bail me from the arrests of death? Who will descend into the dark prison of the grave for me?

Here they all leave me, after having paid a few idle ceremonies to the breathless clay

A. a

which perhaps may lie reposed in state, while my soul, my only conscious part, may stand trembling before my judge.

My afflicted friends, it is very probable, with great solemnity will lay the senseless corpse in a stately monument, inscribed with,

Here lies the Great

But could the pale carcase speak, it would soon reply:

False marble, where ?

Nothing but poor sordid dust lies here! While some flattering panegyric is pronounced at my interment, I may perhaps be hearing my just condemnation at a superior tribunal; where an unerring verdict may sentence me to everlasting infamy. But I cast myself on his absolute mercy, through the infinite merits of the Redeemer of lost mankind. "Adieu, till we meet in the world of spirits."

LACKINGTON.

This man, celebrated as the greatest bookseller in the world, as well as for the many and large editions of his own "Memoirs," written generally to bring Religion, particularly the more spiritual part of it, into ridicule and disrepute, furnishes us with a very remarkable exhibition of the power of Divine Grace. These "Memoirs," and his subsequent "Confessions" of remorse and repentance, display in a very conspicuous manner, why and how, men can contemn the truth and how confused and ashamed they may be by Grace, at their supposed best and most extolled sinful performances.

From a very humble origin, he rose through the assistance of religious friends, to an elevation seldom equalled in men of his low sphere and scanty education. Being of an acute and enquiring mind, he read with eager avidity an astonishing variety of books, which by a very tenacious memory, soon gave him a stock of knowledge, which because not well chosen, nor received with becoming humility, puffed up his aspiring vanity, till like a full blown bladder it burst in infidelity. He had in humbler life, when he needed the consolations of