STUDY VII. 322 



ing maladies without number upon it. But thefe, 

 after all, amount only to the production of lan- 

 guor, and phyfical evils. But they are trained to 

 vice ; they are decoyed into ambition under the 

 guife of emulation. 



Of the two paffions which are the moving prin- 

 ciples of the human heart, namely, love and am- 

 bition, the laft is by far the moft durable, and the 

 mofl dangerous. Ambition is the laft that dies in 

 the aged, and our mode of education puts it pre- 

 maturely in motion in the young. It would be 

 infinitely better to affift them in directing their 

 early tender afFeftions toward an amiable objeél. 

 Moft are deftined, one time or another, to feel the 

 power of this gentle paffion. Nature has, befides, 

 made it the firmeft cement of Society. If their 

 age, or, rather, if our financial manners forbid a 

 commerce of early love, their young affections 

 ought to be directed into the channel of friend- 

 fhip, and thus, as Plato propofes in his Republic, 

 and as Pelopidas effected at Thebes, bataillons of 

 friends might be formed among them, at all feafons 

 prepared to devote themfelves in the fervice of 

 their Country *. 



But 



* Divide tîj i?npera (divide and govern) is a faying, I believe, 

 i){ Machiaver^. Judge of the goodnefs of this maxim, from the 



mifera^le 



