through the gazette of the battle of Trafalgar, while I pronounced, almost agonized, the last memorable words of the immortal Nelson, I heard one lady whisper to another that she had broken her needle."

"It would be difficult to determine," replied I, "whether this inattention most betrays want of sense, of feeling, or of good breeding. The habit of attention should be carefully formed in early life, and then the mere force of custom would teach these ill-bred women 'to assume the virtue if they have it not.'"

The family at the Grove was, with us, an inexhaustible topic whenever we met. I observed to Sir John, "that I had sometimes noticed in charitable families a display, a bustle, a kind of animal restlessness, a sort of mechanical besoin to be charitably busy. That though they fulfilled conscientiously one part of the apostolic injunction, that of 'giving,' yet they failed in the other clause, that of doing it 'with simplicity.'"

"Yes," replied he, "I visit a charitable lady in town, who almost puts me out of love with benevolence. Her own bounties form the entire subject of her conversation. As soon as the breakfast is removed, the table is regularly covered with plans, and proposals, and subscription papers. This display conveniently performs the threefold office of publishing her own charities, furnishing subjects of altercation, and raising contributions on the visitor. Her narratives really cost me more than my subscription. She is so full of debate, and detail, and opposition; she makes you read so many papers of her own drawing up, and so many answers to the schemes of other people, and she has so many objections to every other person's mode of doing good, and so many arguments to prove that her own is the best, that she appears less like a benevolent lady than a chicaning attorney."

"Nothing," said I, "corrects this bustling bounty so completely, as when it is mixed up with religion, I should rather say, as when it flows from religion. This motive, so far from diminishing the energy, augments it; but it cures the display, and converts the irritation into a principle. It transfers the activity from the tongue to the heart. It is the only sort of charity which 'blesses twice.' All charity, indeed, blesses the receiver; but the blessing promised to the giver, I have sometimes trembled to think, may be forfeited even by a generous mind, from ostentation and parade in