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326 fortunate than you or yours? If you take that which is mine to-day, where is your security but that another may take it from you again to-morrow?" And yet poverty—how bitter it is! first its disgrace, and then its want. I never, even in an advertisement praying for that charity which is too often denied, read the words "who have known better days," without a sympathy even to pain. And yet what statute can guard against extravagance, improvidence, or idleness? And even this property—the hinge on which all our social institutions turn, for whose sake we both make and break laws—does that give happiness? Ask the sick, the sad, or the dying, though their home be the palace, and their clothing the purple. Then we have intellectual enjoyments, the works of genius, those of the fine arts. There was Mr. Canning, the eloquent and the patriotic, died, not three years ago, of a fevered mind and a worn-out body—worn out by the scoff, the obstacle, the vain excitement, the exhausting exertion. Genius—was Byron, whose life was divided between disappointment and resentment, was he happy? What is Genius but an altar richly wrought in fine gold, and placed in the most sacred and