the malevolence, but that which may be said to have been al ready inflicted on the mind itself, which has had the painful wish of inflicting evil. The desire of evil to others,-since it is necessary to the protection of the world only in certain cases, is to be measured, then, in our moral estimates, by the nature of the brief or permanent hatred in which it may have originated; and is allowable, therefore, only in the cases in which the hatred is truly a feeling that is necessary in such circumstances for the protection of this social scene. It is virtuous, for example, to feel indignation at oppression; and it is virtuous, therefore, to wish that the oppressor, if he continue to be an oppressor, may not finish his career without punishment, so as to present to the world the dangerous example of guilt, that seems, by its external prosperity, to defy at once humanity and heaven. To take a case of a very different sort, however, it is not virtuous, to wish even for a moment, evil to some successful competitor, who has outstripped us in any honourable career; and the desire of evil in this case is not virtuous because there is no moral ground for that hatred in which the desire originated, when the hatred was not directed to any quality that could be injurious to general happiness, but had for its only object an excellence that has surpassed us, by exhibiting to the world qualities which are capable of benefiting or at least of adorning it, still more than the qualities of which we are proudest in ourselves. Before we think ourselves morally justifiable, then, in any wish of evil to those whom we hate, we must be certain that the hatred which we feel is itself morally justifiable, as directed to actions or qualities which it would not be virtuous to view with complacency, or even with indifference; and that, as it is the guilty frame of mind alone which is hateful in the eyes of a good man, the hatefulness must cease in the very moment of repentance, and the wish of the repentance, therefore, as the most desirable of all changes, be a wish that is ever present, to temper even that pure and gentle indignation which the virtuous feel. There are minds, however, of which the chief wishes of evil are not to those whom it is virtuous to view with disapprobation, but to those whom it is vice not to view with emotions of esteem and veneration. We are eager for distinction in that great theatre of human life, in the wide, and tumultuous, and ever varying spectacles of which we are at once actors and spectators; and when the distinction which we hoped is preoccupied by another of greater merit, our own defect of merit seems to us not so much a defect in ourselves, as a crime in him. We are, perhaps, in every quality exactly what we were before; but we are no longer to our own eyes what we were before. The feeling of our inferiority is forced upon us; and he who has forced it upon us has done us an injury to the extent of the uneasines which he has occasioned, and an injury which, perhaps, we do not feel more as it has affected us in the estimation of others, than we feel it in the mode in which it has affected us in our estimate of ourselves. An injury, then, is done to us; and the feelings which heaven has placed within our breasts as necessary for repelling injury, arise on this instant feeling of evil which we have been made to suffer. But what were necessary for repelling intentional injury, arise where no injury was intended; and though the minds in which they thus arise must be minds that are in the highest degree selfish, and incapable of feeling that noble love of what is noble, which endears to the virtuous the excellence that transcends them, there still are minds, and many minds, so selfish, and so incapable of delighting in excellence that is not their own. The malevolent affection, with which some unfortunate minds are ever disposed to view those whom they consider as competitors, is denominated jealousy, when the competitor, or supposed competitor, is one who has not yet attained their height, and when it is the future that is dreaded. It is denominated envy, when it regards some actual attainment of another. But the emotion, varying with this mere difference of the present and the future, is the every other respect. In both cases, the wish is a wish of evil, a wish of evil to the excellent, and a wish which, by a sort of anticipated retribution, is itself evil to the heart that has conceived it. same in If we were to imagine present together, not a single small group only of those whom their virtues or talents had rendered eminent in a single nation, but all the sages and patriots of every country and period, without one of the frail and guilty contemporaries that mingled with them when they lived on earth,—if we were imagine them collected together, not on an earth of occa sional sunshine and alternate tempests, like that which we inhabit, but in some still fairer world, in which the only variety of the seasons consisted in a change of beauties and delights,—a world in which the faculties and virtues that were originally so admirable, continued still their glorious and immortal progress,-does it seem possible that the contemplation of such a scene so nobly inhabited, should not be delightful to him who might be transported into it! Yet there are minds to which no wide scene of torture would be half so dreadful an object of contemplation as the happiness and purity of such a scene,-minds that would instantly sicken at the very sight, and wish, in the additional malevolence of the vexation which they felt, not, that all were reduced to the mere level of earthly things, but that every thing which met the eye were unmixed weakness, and misery, and guilt. This scene is imaginary only; but what is imaginary as thus combined, is true in its separate parts. There is happiness on earth, virtue on earth, intellectual excellence on earth; and where these exist and are seen by it, envy is as in that imaginary world. He who has not a whole system of which to wish the physical and moral loveliness destroyed, may have wishes that would gladly blast at least whatever peculiar beauty is to be found in this mixed system. He may wish all mankind to remain in ignorance of important truths, when the most important truths that could be revealed to them were to be the discovery of any other genius than his own. He may sigh over the relief which multitudes are to receive from institutions of a sage benevolence, which he was not the first to prompt. If his country be rejoicing at triumphs, that have been triumphs of freedom and humanity still more than of the arms of a single state, he may add his silent consternation and anguish to the rage and grief of the tyrant whose aggressions have been successfully resisted, and may lament that he has not himself become a slave by national disasters, which, in making ali slaves, would at least have lessened the glory of a rival. He may wish evil even here, as he would have wished it in that better scene; and if he wish it less, it is only because the multitude with whom he has to mix on earth have more imperfections of every sort; and being less worthy, therefore, of love or veneration, are less objects of a hatred that VOL. III. 15 extends in its deadliest rancour only to what is worthy of being loved and venerated. There is one change, indeed, which, in a single moment, would dissipate all the malevolence of this malevolent spirit. To convert the hatred into a feeling which might not be very differ. ent, perhaps, from complacency, it would be necessary only to take away every quality that is worthy of love,-to make wisdom, folly, kindness, cruelty,-heroic generosity, a sordid selfishness, -and the glory which was the result of all those better qualities, the execration or disgust of mankind. When the hatred of the virtuous might begin, then the hatred of the envious certainly might cease. The wishes of evil which flow from such a breast, are, as I have said, evil, in the first place, to the breast which feels them; -as the poisonous exhalation, which spreads death perhaps to others, is itself a proof of the disease of the living carcase that exhales it. Envy is truly, in its own miseries, the punishment of itself. "Risus abest-nisi quem visi movere dolores, It is hence, by a sort of contradictory character, what one of the old theological writers has strongly stated it to be,-" at once the justest of passions, and the most unjust,"—"ex omnibus affectibus iniquissimus simul et æquissimus ;"-the most unjust, in the wrongs which it is ever conceiving or perpetrating against him who is its object; the justest, in the punishment with which it is ever avenging on itself the wrongs of which it has been guilty. If even, in thinking of the happiness of those whom they hate, the envious saw only that happiness, as it truly is, mixed with many anxieties, that lessen the enjoyment of honours and dignities to their possessor, the misery with which those dignities of others are regarded would be less. But the chief misery of a mind of this cast is, that the happiness on which it dwells is a happiness which it creates in part to its own conception,-a pure happiness, that seems intense in itself only because it is intensely hated, and that continually grows more and more vivid to the hatred that is continually dwelling on it. The influence of happiness, as thus contemplated by a diseased heart, is like that of light on a diseased eye, that merely, as pained by rays which give no pain to others, imagine the faint colours which are gleaming on it to be of dazzling brilliancy. When a statue had been erected by his fellow citizens of Thasos to Theagenes, a celebrated victor in the public games of Greece, we are told, that it excited so strongly the envious hatred of one of his rivals, that he went to it every night, and endeavoured to throw it down by repeated blows, till at last, unfortunately successful, he was able to move it from its pedestal, and was crushed to death beneath it on its fall. This, if we consider the self-consuming misery of envy, is truly what happens to every envious man. He may, perhaps, throw down his rival's glory; but he is crushed in his whole soul, beneath the glory which he overturns. In thus making the malevolent wishes of the envious heart a source of internal misery, Nature has shewn a provident regard for the happiness of mankind, which would have suffered far more general violation, if it had been as delightful to wish evil, as to wish good. Nor is this true only in cases, in which the malevolent wishes are misdirected against excellence, merely as excellence. The same gentle tempering influence has been provided, as we have seen, for the virtuous malevolence of those, who are malevolent only to cruelty and injustice. It is necessary, indeed, that man should be capable of feeling indignation and resentment in these cases, as of feeling benevolence in the more ordinary happy intercourse of social life. But, since excess in one of these classes of feelings might lead to far more dangerous consequences, than excess in the other, Nature, as I took occasion to point out to you in a former Lecture, has been careful to provide against the more hurtful excess, by rendering benevolence delightful in itself, even while its wishes exist merely as wishes, and resentment painful in itself, while its object is unattained, and, unless in some very obdurate hearts, ready to be appeased by slight atonements,—by the very acknowledgment of the evil done,—or by the mere intervention of a few months or days, between the injury and the moment of forgive ness. On the nature of these feelings, it would be unnecessary, |