have Fortune with her wheel; and those wo- | No.40.] SATURDAY, JAN. 20, 1759.
men that have no character at all, may display
a field of white enamel, as imploring help to
fill up the vacuity.

THE practice of appending to the narratives of public transactions more minute and domestic intelligence, and filling the newspapers with advertisements, has grown up by slow degrees to its present state.

Genius is shown only by invention. The man who first took advantage of the general curiosity that was excited by a siege or battle, to betray the readers of news into the knowledge of the shop where the best puffs and powder were to be sold, was undoubtedly a man of great sagacity and profound skill in the nature of man. But when he had once shown the way, it was easy to follow him; and every man now knows a ready method of informing the public of all that he desires to buy

There is a set of ladies who have outlived most animal pleasures, and having nothing rational to put in their place, solace with cards the loss of what time has taken away, and the want of what wisdom, having never been courted, has never given. For these, I know not now to provide a proper decoration. They cannot be numbered among the gamesters: for though they are always at play, they play for nothing, and never rise to the dignity of hazard or the reputation of skill. They neither love nor are loved, and cannot be supposed to contemplate any human image with delight. Yet though they despair to please, they always wish to be fine, and therefore cannot be with- or sell, whether his wares be material or intelout a bracelet. To this sisterhood I can recommend nothing more likely to please them than the king of clubs, a personage very comely and majestic, who will never meet their eyes without reviving the thought of some past or future party, and who may be displayed in the act of dealing with grace and propriety.

lectual; whether he makes clothes, or teaches the mathematics; whether he be a tutor that wants a pupil, or a pupil that wants a tutor.

Whatever is common is despised. Adver tisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquences sometimes sublime and soinetimes pathetic.

But the bracelet which might be most easily introduced into general use is a small convex mirror, is which the lady may see herself when- Promise, large promise, is the soul of an adever she shall lift her hand. This will be a per-vertisement. I remember a wash-ball that had petual source of delight. Other ornaments a quality truly wonderful—it gave an exquisite are of use only in public, but this will furnish edge to the razor. And there are now to be gratifications to solitude. This will show a face sold, "for ready money only, some duvets for that must always please; she who is followed bed coverings, of down, beyond comparison, by admirers will carry about her a perpetual superior to what is called otter-down, and in justification of the public voice; and she who deed such, that its many excellences cannot be passes without notice may appeal from preju- here set forth." With one excellence we are dice to her own eyes. made acquainted-"it is warmer than four or five blankets, and lighter than one."

But I know not why the privilege of the bracelet should be confined to women; it was in former ages worn by heroes in battle; and as modern soldiers are always distinguished by splendour of dress, I should rejoice to see the bracelet added to the cockade.

There are some, however, that know the prejudice of mankind in favour of modest sincerity. The vender of the beautifying fluid sells a lotion that repels pimples, washes away freckles, smooths the skin, and plumps the flesh: and yet, with a generous abhorrence of ostentation, confesses, that it will not "restore the bloom of fiteen to a lady of fifty."

The true pathos of advertisements must have sunk deep into the heart of every man that remembers the zeal shown by the seller of the anodyne necklace, for the ease and safety of poor toothing infants, and the affection with which he warned every mother, that "she would never forgive herself" if her infant should perish without a necklace.

In hope of this ornamental innovation, I have spent some thoughts upon military bracelets. There is no passion more heroic than love; and therefore I should be glad to see the sons of England marching in the field, every man with the picture of a woman of honour bound upon his hand. But since in the army, as every where else, there will always be men who love nobody but themselves, or whom no woman of honour will permit to love her, there is a necessity of some other distinctions and devices. I have read of a prince who, having lost a I cannot but remark to the celebrated author town, ordered the name of it to be every morning who gave, in his notifications of the camel and shouted in his ear till it should be recovered. For dromedary, so many specimen of the genuine the same purpose I think the prospect of Minor-sublime, that there is now arrived another subca might be properly worn on the hands of some of our generals: others might delight their countrymen, and dignify themselves with a view of Rochefort as it appeared to them at sea: and those that shall return from the conquest of America, may exhibit the warehouse of Frontenac, with an inscription denoting that it was taken in less than three years by less than twenty thousand men.

ject yet more worthy of his pen, A famous Mohawk Indian warrior, who took Dieskaw the French general prisoner, dressed in the same manner with the native Indians when they go to war, with his face and body painted, with his scalping-knife, tom-ax and all other implements of war! a sight worthy the curiosity of every true Briton!" This is a very powerful description: but a critic of great refinement would say, that it conveys rather TOM TOY. horror than terror. An Indian, dressed as he

I am, Sir, &c.

No. 41.)

THE IDLER.

goes to war, may bring company together;
but if he carries the scalping knife, and tom-
ax, there are many true Britons that will never
be persuaded to see him but through a grate.
It has been remarked by the severer judges,
that the salutary sorrow of tragic scenes is
too soon effaced by the merriment of the epi-
logue; the same inconvenience arises from
the improper disposition of advertisements.
The noblest objects may be so associated as to
be made ridiculous. The camel and drome-
dary themselves might have lost much of their
dignity between "the true flower of mustard
and the original Daffy's elixir;" and I could
not but feel some indignation, when I found
this illustrious Indian warrior immediately
succeeded by "a fresh parcel of Dublin but

public; but I could not persuade myself to
suppress it, because I think I know the sen-
ttments to be sincere, and I feel no disposi-
tion to provide for this day any other enter-
tainnment.

At tu quisquis eris, miseri qui crude poeta
Credideris fletu funera digna tuo,
Hæc postrema tibi sit flendi causa, fluatque
Lenis inoffenso vitaque morsque gradu.

MR. IDLER,
NorwITHSTANDING the warnings of philoso-
phers, and the daily examples of losses and
misfortunes which life forces upon our obser-
vation, such is the absorption of our thoughts
in the business of the present day, such the re-
signation of our reason to empty hopes of fu-
ture felicity, or such our unwillingness to fore-
see what we dread, that every calamity comes
suddenly upon us, and not only presses us as
a burden, but crushes as a blow.

The trade of advertising is now so near to perfection, that it is not easy to propose any improvement. But as every art ought to be There are evils which happen out of the comexercised in due subordination to the public good, I cannot but propose it as a moral mon course of nature, against which it is no requestion to these masters of the public ear, proach not to be provided. A flash of lightWhether they do not sometimes play too wan-ning intercepts the traveller in his way. The tonly with our passions, as when the registrar of lottery tickets invites us to his shop by an account of the prizes which he sold last year; and whether the advertising controvertists do not indulge asperity of language without any adequate provocation; as in the dispute about straps for razors, now happily subsided, and in the altercation which at present subsists concerning eau de luce?

In an advertisement it is allowed to every man to speak well of himself, but I know not why he should assume the privilege of censurSng his neighbour. He may proclaim his own virtue or skill, but ought not to exclude others from the same pretensions.

Every man that advertises his own excellence should write with some consciousness of character which dares to call the attention of the public. He should remember that his name is to stand in the same paper with those of the king of Prussia and the emperor of Germany, and endeavour to make himself worthy of such association.

Some regard is likewise to be paid to posterity. There are men of diligence and curiosity who treasure up the papers of the day merely because others neglect them, and in When these coltime they will be scarce. lections shall be read in another century, how will numberless contradictions be reconciled; and how shall fame be possibly distributed among the tailors and boddice-makers of the present age?

Surely these things deserve consideration. It is enough for me to have hinted my desire that these abuses may be rectified; but such is the state of nature, that what all have the right of doing, many will attempt without sufficient care or due qualifications.

concussion of an earthquake heaps the ruins of cities upon their inhabitants. But other miseries time brings, though silently, yet visibly, forward by its even lapse, which yet approach us unseen, because we turn our eyes away, and seize us unresisted, because we could not arm ourselves against them but by setting them before us.

That it is vain to shrink from what cannot be avoided, and to hide that from ourselves which must sometime be found, is a truth which we all know, but which all neglect, and perhaps none more than the speculative reasoner, whose thoughts are always from home, whose eye wanders over life, whose fancy dances after meteors of happiness kindled by itself, and who examines every thing rather than his own state.

Nothing is more evident than that the decays of age must terminate in death; yet there is no man, says Tully, who does not believe that he may yet live another year; and there is none who does not, upon the same principle, hope another year for his parent or his friend; but the fallacy will be in time detected; the last year, the last day, must come. It has come, and is past. The life which made my own life pleasant is at an end, and the gates of death are shut upon my prospects.

The loss of a friend upon whom the heart was fixed, to whom every wish and endeavour tended, is a state of dreary desolation, in which the mind looks abroad impatient of itself, and finds nothing but emptiness and hor ror. The blameless life, the artless tenderness, the pious simplicity, the modest resignation, the patient sickness, and the quiet death, are remembered only to add value to the loss, to aggravate regret for what cannot be amended, to deepen sorrow for what cannot be recalled.

These are the calamities by which Providence gradually disengages us from the love of life. Other evils fortitude may repel, or hop may mitigate; but irreparable privation leaves no

thing to exercise resolution or flatter expecta- | hath rather attempted to paint some possible tion. The dead cannot return, and nothing is distress than really feels the evils she has deleft us here but languishment and grief.

PERDITA.

No. 43.] SATURDAY, FEB. 10, 1759.

set her above them; yet I am afraid the most in your power to be a better friend than her charitable of them will hardly think it possible father to for me to be daily spectatress of his vices without tacitly allowing them, and at last consenting to them, as the eye of the frighted infant is, by degrees reconciled to the darkness of which at first it was afraid. It is a common opinion, he himself must very well know, that vices, like diseases, are often hereditary; and that the property of the one is to infect the manners, as the other poisons the springs of life.

THE natural advantages which arise from the position of the earth which we inhabit, with respect to the other planets, afford much employment to mathematical speculation, by which it has been discovered, that no other conformation of the system could have given such commodious distributions of light and heat, or imparted fertility and pleasure to so great a part of a revolving sphere.

It may be, perhaps, observed by the moralist, with equal reason, that our globe seems particularly fitted for the residence of a being, placed here only for a short time, whose task is, to advance himself to a higher and happier state of existence, by unremitted vigilance of caution, and activity of virtue.

Yet this though bad, is not the worst; my father deceives himself the hopes of the very child he has brought into the world; he suffers his house to be the seat of drunkenness, riot, and irreligion: who seduces, almost in my sight, the menial servant, converses with the prostitute, and corrupts the wife! Thus I, who from my earliest dawn of reason was taught to think that at my approach every eye sparkled with pleasure, or was dejected as conscious of superior charms, am excluded from society, through fear lest I should partake, if not of The duties required of a man are such as humy father's crimes, at least of his reproach. man nature does not willingly perform, and Is a parent, who is so little solicitous for the such as those are inclined to delay who yet inwelfare of a child, better than a pirate who tend some time to fufil them. It was thereturns a wretch adrift in a boat at sea, without fore necessary that this universal reluctance a star to steer by, or an anchor to hold it fast? should be conteracted, and the drowsiness of Am I not to lay all my miseries at those doors hesitation wakened into resolve; that the danwhich ought to have opened only for my protec-ger of procrastination should be always in tion? And if doomed to add at last one more view, and the fallacies of security be hourly to the number of those wretches whom neither detected. the world nor its law befriends, may I not justly say that I have been awed by a parent into ruin? But though a parent's power is screened from insult and violation by the very words of Heaven, yet surely no laws, divine or human, forbid me to remove myself from the malignant shade of a plant that poisons all around it, blasts the bloom of youth, checks its improvements, and makes all its flowerets fade; The day has been considered as an image of but to whom can the wretched, can the depen- the year and the year as the representation of dent fly? For me to fly a father's house, is to life. The morning answers to the spring, and be a beggar; I have only one comforter amidst the spring to childhood and youth; the noon my anxieties, a pious relation, who bids me corresponds to the summer, and the summer to appeal to Heaven for a witness of my just in- the strength of manhood. The evening is an tentions, fly as a deserted wretch to its protec-emblem of autumn, and autumn of declining life. tion; and being asked who my father is, point, like the ancient philosopher, with my finger to

the heavens

To this end all the appearances of nature uniformly conspire. Whatever we see on every side reminds us of the lapse of time and the flux of life. The day and night succeed each other, the rotation of seasons diversifies the year, the sun rises, attains the meridian, declines and sets; and the moon every night changes its form.

The night with its silence and darkness shows the winter, in which all the powers of vegetation are benumbed; and the winter points out the time when life shall cease, with its hopes and pleasures..

The hope in which I write this, is, that you will give it a place in your paper; and as your essays sometimes find their way into the coun- He that is carried forward, however swiftly, try, that my father may read my story there; by a motion equable and easy, perceives not the and, if not for his own sake yet for mine, spare change of place but by the variation of obto perpetuate that worst of calamities to me,jects. If the wheel of life, which rolls thus the loss of character, from which all his dissimulation has not been able to rescue himself. Tell the world, Sir, that it is possible for virtue to keep its throne unshaken without any other guard than itself; that it is possible to maintain that purity of thought so necessary to the completion of human excellence even in the midst of temptations; when they have no friend within, nor are assisted by the voluntary indulgence of vicious thoughts.

If the insertion of a story like this does not break in on the plan of your paper, you have it

silently along, passed on through undistinguishable uniformity, we should never mark its approaches to the end of the course. If one hour were like another; if the passage of the sun did not show that the day is wasting; if the change of seasons did not impress upon us the flight of the year; quantities of duration equal to days and years would glide unobserved. If the parts of time were not variously coloured, we should never discern their departure or succession, but should live thoughtless of the past, and careless of the future, without will, and perhaps without power, to compute the periods of life, or to

compare the time which is already lost with that which may probably remain.

But the course of time is so visibly marked, that it is observed even by the birds of passage, and by nations who have raised their minds very little above animal instinct; there are human beings whose language does not supply them with words by which they can number five, but I have read of none that have not names for day and night, for summer and winter.

Yet it is certain that these admonitions of nature, however forcible, however importunate, are too often vain; and that many who mark with such accuracy the course of time, appear to have little sensibility of the decline of life. Every man has something to do which he neglects; every man has faults to conquer which he delays to combat.

things, is far the most pleasing part of mental occupation. We are naturally delighted with novelty, and there is a time when all that we see is new. When first we enter into the world, whithersoever we turn our eyes, they meet Knowledge with Pleasure at her side; every diversity of nature pours ideas in upon the soul; neither search nor labour are necessary; we have nothing more to do than to open our eyes, and curiosity is gratified.

Much of the pleasure which the first survey of the world affords, is exhausted before we are conscious of our own felicity, or able to compare our condition with some other possible state. We have therefore few traces of the joy of our earliest discoveries; yet we all remember a time when nature had so many untasted gratifica tions, that every excursion gave delight which can now be found no longer, when the noise of a torrent, the rustle of a wood, the song of birds, or the play of lambs, had power to fill the attention, and suspend all perception of the course of time.

So little do we accustom ourselves to consider the effects of time, that things necessary and certain often surprise us like unexpected contingencies. We leave the beauty in her bloom, and, after an absence of twenty years, wonder, But these easy pleasures are soon at end; we at our return, to find her faded. We meet have seen in a very little time so much, that we those whom we left children, and can scarcely call out for new objects of observation, and enpersuade ourselves to treat them as men. The deavour to find variety in books and life. But traveller visits in age those countries through study is laborious, and not always satisfactory; which he rambled in his youth, and hopes for and conversation has its pains as well as pleamerriment at the old place. The man of busi-sures; we are willing to learn but not willness wearied with unsatisfactory prosperity, retires to the town of his nativity, and expects to play away the last years with the companions of his childhood, and recover youth in the fields where he once was young.

From this inattention, so general and so mischievous, let it be every man's study to exempt himself. Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction. And let him, who purposes his own happiness, reflect, that while he forms his purpose the day rolls on, and "the night cometh when no man can work!"

No. 44.] SATURDAY, FEB. 17, 1759.

ing to be taught; we are pained by ignorance, but pained yet more by another's knowledge.

From the vexation of pupilage men commonly set themselves free about the middle of life, by shutting up the avenues of intelligence, and resolving to rest in their present state; and they, whose ardour of inquiry continues longer, find themselves insensibly forsaken by their in structors. As every man advances in life, the proportion between those that are younger and that are older than himself, is continually changing; and he that has lived half a century finds few that do not require from him that information which he once expected from those that went before him.

Then it is that the magazines of memory are opened, and the stores of accumulated knowledge are displayed by vanity or benevolence, or in honest commerce of mutual interest. Every man wants others, and is therefore glad when he is wanted by them. And as few men will endure the labour of intense meditation without necessity, he that has learned enough for his profit or his honour, seldom endeavours

MEMORY is, among the faculties of the human mind, that of which we make the most frequent use, or rather that of which the agency is incessant or perpetual. Memory is the primary and fundamental power, without which there could be no other intellectual operation. Judg-after further acquisitions. ment and ratiocination suppose something al- The pleasure of recollecting speculative noready known, and draw their decisions only tions would not be much less than that of gainfrom experience. Imagination selects ideas ing them, if they could be kept pure and from the treasures of remembrance, and pro- unmingled with the passages of life; but such duces novelty only by varied combinations. is the necessary concatention of our thoughts, We do not even form conjectures of distant, or that good and evil are linked together, and no anticipations, of future events, but by conclud-pleasure recurs but associated with pain. Every ing what is possible from what is past.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution; by one images are accumulated, and by the other produced for use. Collection is always the employment of our first years; and distribution commonly that of our advanced age.

To collect and reposit the various forms of

revived idea reminds us of a time, when something was enjoyed that is now lost, when some hope was yet not blasted, when some purpose had yet not languished into sluggishness or indifference.

Whether it be that life has more vexations than comforts, or, what is in the event just the same, that evil makes deeper impression than