cy, if it merits the name, is not an affair of
artificial and supersubtle refinement, but is based in the fundamental
principles of our nature. It is unavoidable that, when we have reached
the close of any great epoch of our existence, and still more when we
have arrived at its final term, we should regret its transitory nature,
and lament that we have made no more effectual use of it. And yet the
periods and portions of the stream of time, as they pass by us, will
often be felt by us as insufferably slow in their progress, and we would
give no inconsiderable sum to procure that the present section of our
lives might come to an end, and that we might turn over a new leaf in
the volume of existence.

I have heard various men profess that they never knew the minutes
that hung upon their hands, and were totally unacquainted with what,
borrowing a term from the French language, we call ennui. I own I have
listened to these persons with a certain degree of incredulity, always
excepting such as earn their subsistence by constant labour, or as,
being placed in a situation of active engagement, have not the leisure
to feel apathy and disgust.

But we are talking here of that numerous class of human beings, who
are their own masters, and spend every hour of the day at the choice of
their discretion. To these we may add the persons who are partially so,
and who, having occupied three or four hours of every day in discharge
of some function necessarily imposed on them, at the striking of a given
hour go out of school, and employ themselves in a certain industry or
sport purely of their own election.

To go back then to the consideration of the single day of a man, all
of whose hours are at his disposal to spend them well or ill, at the
bidding of his own judgment, or the impulse of his own caprice.

We will suppose that, when he rises from his bed, he has sixteen hours
before him, to be employed in whatever mode his will shall decide. I
bar the case of travelling, or any of those schemes for passing the day,
which by their very nature take the election out of his hands, and fill
up his time with a perpetual motion, the nature of which is ascertained
from the beginning.

With such a man then it is in the first place indispensibly necessary,
that he should have various successive occupations. There is no one
study or intellectual enquiry to which a man can apply sixteen hours
consecutively, unless in some extraordinary instance