different consequences. When the great are so unhappy as to forget themselves, the biass of education, and bright examples constantly before them, contribute, if not to set them quite right, yet at least to preserve them from absolute deviation. While the lower sort of people, especially about this town, wanting the same advantages of both education and example; if they once vary from the road of virtue, they are, generally speaking, lost past redemption. But if the case should be, which chiefly engages this letter, that there is a third rank, which, if I may so speak with propriety, are less than the little, that had never any opportunity of knowing the goods things of either heaven or earth; lost from the moment of their birth, and immersed from their cradles in ignorance, stupidity, and misery: I say, if such people there be, and those in multitudes, within the verge of this capacious hive, what sort of creatures are the best of us all, who preach and pray, or cant and talk nonsense, with eminent divine faces, that send missionaries abroad, to convert the Indians, or buy bibles, to make the Welsh and Highlanders Christians, while savages live in crouds under our noses, whom we treat on Popish principles, and convert by hanging, or transporting? Would not a stranger who had heard of our society for propagating the Gospel some thousand miles off, if living here a little time, and seeing the miserable wretches which every day present, conclude all religion a farce, and government a mere jest? If he saw at the same time 20,000 people idle, while a few hundreds travel from the most remote parts to make our hay, or reap our corn; would he not conclude us all infatuated? or could he wonder, if he saw these prey like wild beasts on all they meet, when he sees so vast a disparity between street and street, person and person, one glorious rich and shining, the other miserable, beyond even a sense of misery? Would he not naturally ask why are not the ways of these people more attended to? Does it require so much skill to make the poor industrious here, more than in other places, that human understanding is not capable of reaching the means? And are these your fellow creatures just under your eye of less regard to you, than those who live some thousand miles distant? These and such like would be the natural and obvious reflections of a simple stranger.

It is a general principle here, that charity begins at home. And it may without vanity be said, that the English are not the last amongst the nations, for either generosity or humanity. How happens it then, that these principles are evidently falsified, and that charity, generosity, and humanity seem to be quite banished from amongst us; surely it must arise from the want of understanding the disease, through a defect of the state of things being set in a picturesque light, and placed in the view of all; or such a complaint, such a shocking grievance could not possibly exist.

In the last hard frost I observed all ranks of people extremely generous and humane. They themselves felt the severity of the season. Nature then pictured the hardship, and presented it before them, they evidently perceived it, and acted with a becoming humanity, some