was proved to have always had her oysters scolloped, to avoid the barbarity of swallowing the innocents alive, was sentenced to eat a barrel of natives daily, and the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals presented her with a silver opener. Virtue, of whatever order, was not its "own reward" in that city. On the contrary, it was extremely well paid, and always a valuable commodity. This was a condition of things not to be contemplated by a moralist without a passionate enthusiasm. 66 Oh, virtuous community!" I cried, "how unselfish, how disinterested a view of humanity have you at length afforded to my eyes! Oh, laws! framed for the express reward of virtue, how unlike the laws under which I have been living! Oh, competition in benevolence and magnanimity! how unspeakably unlike the competition prevalent in the society I have left! Good, happy, glorious citizens, realisers of the perfectibility which has hitherto existed but in dreams, how ennobling and rapturous a sight to witness the profitableness of virtue, the high market-value of exalted sentiments, the benefits you disinterestedly heap upon yourselves by making sacrifices for others! Virtue at last makes a good thing of it, lolling in velvet, and crammed with venison!" THE CITY OF THE VIRTUES. THERE was something in the spectacle of Virtue rewarded by law that proved quite intoxicating, but in so exemplary a community, sobriety was not long absent; and then I began to be sensible of a few concomitant circumstances which considerably qualified my raptures. I admired beyond measure the anxiety which every one evinced to do some good deed, but when it proved to be such a good morning's work, the admiration lessened, and the wonder grew more intelligible and familiar. When a good citizen, to shelter a large family burnt out over the way, admitted them all into his house, and went, with his wife, into lodgings, I was lost in delight to see people loving their neighbours better than themselves; but the sentence of the court, decreeing a handsome reward for this virtue, naturally diminished my enthusiasm. The kind soul (but perhaps he had never thought of this) had let his house for the season at a high rent. A poor object, so reduced as to be in danger of perishing for want of seven and threepence, was accosted by a stranger, who, with tears in his eyes, instantly paid the money, and then gloriously added half a crown, making the mourner quite happy. It was a pleasant deed to do, and not expensive; for a lucky piece of charity of that kind entitled the performer to a guinea from government. When there was some great act of virtue to be accomplished, something unusually handsome to be done, it made the soul swell with joyful pride to behold hundreds eager to do the deed at an enormous sacrifice; and what exultation was in the heart of the successful competitor, when he had all but ruined himself by his goodness! Yet the splendid recompense and the high public honour awarded when the case came to be heard in court, made the disinterestedness less dazzling, and threw a disagreeable light upon the emulation. The people were generally very virtuous, but thenmy own virtue is candour-there was little temptation to be otherwise. The vicious people, decidedly the minority, were the uneducated, the unenlightened! they went blundering about in crime, could never get on, and barely made a living. The cleverer folks followed Virtue, who scattered "largess" liberally; and they, of course, made pretty pickings. The system was at least open to this objection; that it could not always appear whether the well-doer was influenced more by the certainty of gain or the love of good, since the one always attended upon the other. Zeal for excellence, or for its reward, some would say, was, moreover, carried occasionally into extremes; and in the City of the Virtues, Master Blifil would certainly have been rewarded for letting Sophy's bird fly, on the principle that "everything had a right to liberty;" and the squire, if he had possessed an estate there, would have needed to look still more closely after those partridges to whose emancipation he was unvirtuously opposed. Besides, the quid-pro-quo principle was more than carried out. A man never scrupled to lend five pounds very good-naturedly; but then he never hesitated to borrow, in the handsomest manner, ten. A gentleman declined to drag the destroyer of his domestic peace, the stainer of that honour which was dear to him as his own, into a court of law to wring vile lucre from him; but then there was another court, in which a large reward was decreed to brotherly forgiveness and Christian forbearance, under all such circumstances. I was confirmed in the impression that many amongst the virtuous community were not perfect Howards, by the disappointment and vexation they plainly evinced when, in the course of a morning's rounds, they had met with no case of peculiar misery and distress. Not to find a fellow-creature pining in the last stage of suffering, reduced to utter anguish and despair, was to be quite out of luck, and discontent was visible upon the countenance when such a dearth of calamities was mentioned. Their feeling seemed to be exactly that of the apothecary in a remarkably healthy season, or of an attorney when litigation has taken leave of his part of the country for a term. But they became as merry as larks when they again met with a misery or two that they could relieve; and were as watchful for cases of real affliction as undertakers for future favours. engines are not more rapid on the road to a conflagration, than they were on the rush to a scene of calamity and devastation; but a suspicion certainly would steal in, that the scale of rewards had something to do with the zeal to outstrip and be foremost. Fire When troubles were scarce, and wrongs admitting of redress by the exercise of a noble generosity were not to be found, the exclamation of the virtuous Roman, "I have lost a day," was heard in a hundred places; but I could not help thinking, that it was uttered in a tone implying that everything was going out and nothing coming in. Virtue received no wages that day, having nothing on earth to do. In very hard times, the performance of simple duties, such as sheltering a destitute parent, or taking a sick grandmother to the sea-side, was obliged to be furbished up into a virtue, and made as rewardable as possible, But in the higher ranks of the virtuous, this was held to be rather shabby and undignified, and was only resorted to by persons in straitened circumstances of morality. As I looked on and mingled in free intercourse with the citizens, I grew less and less in love with the virtue that has always before it, not the prospect merely, but the certainty of reward; and secretly felt assured that the old system, under which virtue was rarely rewarded but frequently punished, was after all more favourable to its growth and prosperity, its strength, its beauty, and its permanence. It would be pleasant, I felt, to see some man of preeminent virtue disappointed of his reward; to see it withheld by law, stopped by a quibble. How would he act under the consciousness of having done good gratuitously? The wish was no sooner formed than, entering the Court of Reward, I became a witness of the very event. It appeared that a man of virtue, thrice-tried and purified beyond all suspicion of alloy, had become accidentally cognizant of the desperate attempt of a burglar to break from prison. The felon was wedged between iron bars, jammed, choked, and almost cut in two, unable either to go back or get out. The good man could thrust him in, or drag him forth. He halted between justice and generosity; between a mere common duty, and an act of exalted virtue. The felon at that critical moment prayed for liberty-liberty to go in penitence, and receive, before he died, the blessing of an aged heart-broken father. The good man hastily weighed both sides of the case; the capture of the felon was the proper operation of the law, but the aiding in his escape, thus far advanced, was a heroism beyond the law-a justice more than legal. With a soft heart and a hard hand he dragged into freedom the repentant burglar, who broke that very night into the house of the judge who was to have tried him. But the virtuous deed was not therefore tarnished, although the brightness of the judge's tea-service and the beauty of his wife's jewel-case were gone. Justice, however, never |