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TO THE MISERABLE.

CHILDREN of misfortune, wheresoever found, and whatsoever enduring,-ye who, arrogating to yourselves a kind of sovereignty in suffering, maintain, that all the throbs of torture, all the pungency of sorrow, all the bitterness of desperation, are your own-who are so torn and spent with the storms and struggles of mortality, as to faint, or freeze, even at the personation of those ruined Wretches, whose Stories wash the stage of tragedy with tears and blood-approach a more disastrous scene! Take courage to behold a Pageant of calamities, which calls you to renounce your sad monopoly. Dispassionately ponder all your worst of woes, in turn with these; then hasten to distil from the comparison an opiate for your fiercest pangs; and learn to recognise the lenity of your Destinies,

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if they have spared you from the lightest of those mightier and more grinding agonies, which claim to be emphatically characterized as "The Miseries of Human Life;"-miseries, which excruciate the minds and bodies of none more insupportably, than of those Heroes in anguish, those writhing Martyrs to the plagues and frenzies of vexation, whose trembling hands must shortly cease to trace the names of

TIMOTHY TESTY,
SAMUEL SENSITIVE.

*The above address, written by Mr Sensitive, was heartily subscribed by his pitiable Partner in the Firm of Misery.

THE

MISERIES OF HUMAN LIFE.

DIALOGUE THE FIRST.

Testy and Sensitive.

Sensitive.

WELL, Mr Testy, and how are things going

with you?

Testy. How!-why just as they always have gone-downwards-backwards-crookedly-spirally-any how but upwards, or straight forwards;—and, 'faith, if I may judge from the ruefulness of your visage, neighbour Sensitive, your affairs are not moving in a much better direction.

Sen. Better! O, Mr Testy! if there be any worse, you have only to suppose it for me.-But you, my friend!-you are, happily,

of a hardy and contentious make; and, turbid as the stream of your life may occasionally be, it presently works itself clear again by its own commotion;-while mine presents a languid, yet a fretting current, with just enough of agitation to collect a perpetual sediment, which it has not, afterwards, the strength to precipitate, or disperse !-In plainer language, Mr Testy, I strongly suspect that, if we should ever come to be dissected, you would furnish the phenomenon of an human body, in which the nerves have been omitted; while my operator would, perhaps, discover little else. I have a strange curiosity upon this subject-could I venture to propose, dear Sir, for the good of mankind, that we should draw up a sort of codicil to our wills, so as just to leave ourselves to Mr Cline, to be

Test-Carved and served up to his pupils, I suppose !—thank ye, Sir-infinitely obliged to you, upon my life, for so readily letting me into your benevolent scheme—though I can't say, somehow, that it seems to inspire me!-no-you are very good-very, indeed —but, really—with a proper sense of the obligation all along-I seem as if I should be quite as well satisfied to remain as I am, as

long as I can hold together.-Why, what the D-l is all this " gypsy-jargon" about nerves and fibres, and I know not what, which is gaining head upon us every hour?—Nerves! -why, what can you do more, with all your nerves to help you, than live in a frenzy ?— and what do I do less?

Sen. Compose yourself, Mr Testy, while I proceed to tell you that your troubles are made of matter, and mine of spirit; that the body is a block, and the soul..... but, "canimus surdis;"-what do you know, or guess, of all those finer disquietudes, those quivering susceptibilities, that feverish fastidiousness, and those qualmish, recoiling disgusts, which constitute at once the pride and the plague of this gossamer frame of mine?-I, indeed, by the painful privilege of my nature, am, as it were, ambidexter in misery; being no less exquisitely alive to your grosser annoyances, or tangible tribulations, than to those subtler and more elegant agonies, which are my own peculiar inheritance; for the nerves, Sir, holding, by a sort of amphibious tenure, both to mind and body, acquaint me with the whole circle of dissatisfactions.

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