than the divine or legislator. Indeed he seems to have been created with peculiar penetrative faculties, and integrity of disposition, and a happy genius to display the enormity of the features, while it corrects the corrupt exercise of our vices. The legislator may frame laws sufficiently wise and judicious, to check and control villany, without the power of impeding the progress of vice and folly, while they are kept within the limits of only injuring ourselves. For law has no power to punish us for the vices which debilitate our constitution, destroy our substance, or degrade our character.

   Nor can religion entirely extirpate vice, no more than she can even control folly. Her two principles, alluring to virtue by promise of reward, and dissuading from vice by threats of punishment, extend their influence no farther than on those whose dispositions are susceptible of their impressions. So that we find numbers among

   mankind whose conduct and opinions are beyond her power. The atheist, who disbelieves a future existence, is not likely to check the exercise of his favourite vicious habits for any hope of reward or dread of punishment; and the debauchee, who, though he may not deny the truth of her tenets, yet is too much absorbed in his pleasures, to listen to her precepts, or regard her examples. Besides, there are many so weak in their resolution as not to be capable of breaking the fetters of habit and prepossession, although they are, at the same time, sensible of their destructive consequences. It is, therefore, that nature has implanted in us a sense which tends to correct our disposition, where law and religion are seen to have no power. This sense is a desire of public estimation, which not only tends to give mankind perfection in every art and science, but also to render our personal character respectable. It is this susceptibility of shame and infamy which gives satire its efficiency.

   Without this sense of ourselves, the scourge would lose its power of chastisement. We should receive the lashes without a sense of their pain; and without the sense of their pain we would never amend from this affliction. From the desire of

   being approved and noticed, arises every effort which constitutes the variety of employments and excellencies the world possesses. It actuates the prince and the beggar, the peasant and the politician, the labourer and the scholar, the mechanic and the soldier, the player and the divine. In a word, there is not an individual in the community whose conduct is not influenced by its dictates. It is, therefore, not surprising 

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