s
quite entitled to expect us to consider. Southey's _Cottonian Library_
was all quite right; and you would have said that the books were very
nicely bound, considering; for Southey could not afford to pay the
regular binder's charges; and it was better that his books should be
done up in cotton of various hues by the members of his own family than
that they should remain not bound at all. You will think, too, of the
poor old parson who wrote a book which he thought of great value, but
which no publisher would bring out. He was determined that all his
labor should not be lost to posterity. So he bought types and a
printing-press, and printed his precious work, poor man: he and his
man-servant did it all. It made a great many volumes; and the task
took up many years. Then he bound the volumes with his own hands; and
carrying them to London, he placed a copy of his work in each of the
public libraries. I dare say he might have saved himself his labor. How
many of my readers could tell what was the title of the work, or what
was the name of its author? Still, _there_ was a man who accomplished
his design, in the face of every disadvantage.

There is a great point of difference between our feeling towards the
human being who runs his race much overweighted and our feeling towards
the inferior animal that does the like. If you saw a poor horse gamely
struggling in a race, with a weight of a ton extra, you would pity it.
Your sympathies would all be with the creature that was making the best
of unfavorable circumstances. But it is a sorrowful fact, that the
drag-weight of human beings not unfrequently consists of things which
make us angry rather than sympathetic. You have seen a man carrying
heavy weight in life, perhaps in the form of inveterate wrong-headedness
and suspiciousness; but instead of pitying him, our impulse would rather
be to beat him upon that perverted head. We pity physical malformation
or unhealthiness; but our bent is to be angry with intellectual and
moral malformation or unhealthiness. We feel for the deformed man, who
must struggle on at that sad disadvantage; feeling it, too, much more
acutely than you would readily believe. But we have only indignation for
the man weighted with far worse things, and things which, in some cases
at least, he can just as little help. You have known men whose extra
pounds, or even extra ton, was a hasty temper, flying out of a sudden
into ungovernable bursts: or a moral