ON HUMAN HAPPINESS. 



because, though the terms virtue and happiness arp strikingly comprehensive, 

 there is no great difference of opinion either among the iearned or the un- 

 learned concerning their general outlines or more prominent characteristics. 



The question, then, ought to be argued in relation to the happiness both of 

 the individual and of the community ; or, in other words, to the happiness of 

 man in his private and his social capacity. 



Is the practice of virtue most contributory to a man's individual hap- 

 piness ? The libertine says No ; and he seeks for it in his mistress, whom 

 he changes as often as he changes his dress. The glutton says No ; unless a 

 good city-feast be virtue; for the soul of happiness with him consists in a 

 haunch of venison and a brisk circulation of the bottle. The spendthrift 

 says No : you may as well seek for happiness in a haystack: happiness, my 

 dear sir, you may depend upon it, consists in nothing else than a good stud, 

 and a pack of hounds. The gamester, in like manner, says No ; and he 

 directs us to a pack of cards and a pair of dice. Even the miser joins in 

 the general negative, and would fain persuade us that it resides in the meagre 

 and miserable ghost that constitutes his own person, or the meagre and mise- 

 rable pursuits to which his person is daily prostituted. 



Now all these have, no doubt, their respective enjoyments; but do they 

 constitute happiness in any fair sense of the term"? are they permanent 1 

 I do not say throug-h life, but for four-and-twenty hours together. Many of 

 them, on the contrary, are of that violent kind that they wear themselves out 

 in an hour or two; and what is the state of the system before it recovers 

 sufficient energy for a renewal 1 To say that it is as empty as an air-pump 

 would be to give a belter character of it than it deserves. It is not empty; 

 it is still full ; full of bitterness or insupportable languor, sickness at heart or 

 sickness at the stomach. Even the miser, who, properly speaking, provides for a 

 longer range of enjoyment than any of the rest of this precious group, is a victim 

 while he is a worshipper, a sacrifice to anxiety while an idolater of Mammon. 



We are at present, however, merely following them up through a single day; 

 but life is a series of days : in its ordinary estimate, of threescore years and ten. 

 And he who is a candidate for happiness must prepare himself, not for a single 

 day, but for the entire term : he must save his strength, and proceed cautiously, 

 for there is no race in which he may so soon run himself out of breath. His 

 motto may perhaps be, " A short life and a merry one ;" and this, in truth, is 

 the motto, and not the motto only, but the brief history, of most of those 

 whom we have thus far considered. For consumption, dropsy, gout, or 

 chagrin and suicide, make not unfrequently a woful havoc in their ranks be- 

 fore they have cleared two-thirds of the pleasurable career they had proposed 

 to themselves. Let them, then, have their motto if they will ; but let them 

 not boast that they have found out the specific for making life happy ; for all 

 that tiiey have found out is a specific for throwing both life and happiness 

 away at the same time. They have had a few fitful bursts of enjoyment ; but 

 the price has been enormous, — a costly birthright for a mess of pottage. He 

 only can fairly boast of happiness, place it in whatever way you please, who, 

 on casting up the account, can honestly say that it has accompanied him 

 through the long run. 



There is another and a very different set of people, both in the higher and 

 lower ranks of life, who also occasionally strive to persuade themselves that 

 they are happy, and who are sometimes actually thought so by those around 

 them : and these are the listless and idle, who loll and saunter life away as 

 though it were a dream ; and who, in truth, are more alive in their dreams 

 than in their waking hours. Now, happiness consists inactivity: such is the 

 constitution of our nature : it is a running stream, and not a stagnant pool. It 

 shows itself under this form from the first moment it shows itself at all. Behold 

 the happiness of the infant or of the schoolboy : he is full of frolic ; he can- 

 not contain the current of self-delight: in the bold significancy of vulgar 

 language, it runs out at his fingers' ends. Upon the whole, the listless and 

 idle have less pretensions to happiness than the characters we have just sur- 

 veyed, — the libertine, the gamester, and the spendthrift : for should you distil 



