He did his duty to
posterity, in leaving them beautiful literature and song, but to his own
associates he was unsparing in his good-natured demands. It is safe to
say that he who tries to ennoble friendship is best worthy of the name
of friend, and he who belittles it, has fewer claims to man's humanity.
Everytime we deny the existence of a satisfying, friendship, we proclaim
aloud our own baseness. Let us avoid it.

ENVY

Envy will merit as its shade pursue,
But, like a shadow, proves the substance true.

Pope.--Essay on Criticism.

No passion has been more universally recognized than envy
as the basest of all the traits that undermine the nobility of man; and
yet there is no obnoxious quality so universal in men's characters. In
the life of the good man it reminds one of the mice, in our houses,
which eat their way to our attention and their own destruction; for
there are few men who have looked into their own hearts who have not
seen the small but odious traces of this gnawing evil. Again, the mind
of the bad man, who has given himself entirely up to envy, is

A WOLF'S DEN--

a howling pandemonium, where no quarter is given, and where the merits
of the deserving rather than the lapses of the blameworthy are torn as
the most toothsome morsel in a furious feast. The Bible says that envy
is the rottenness of the bones, meaning that utter corruption which has
finally reached the framework of the structure. Society as now organized
is really making progress toward the extinction of this hideous blemish.
When, as in AEsop's fables,

A TAILLESS FOX

is found advocating the disuse of tails, he is at once suspected, and
his influence greatly limited. For the world is waking up to the
meanness of envy. The world, in its better moments, is rising above it.
It is one of our principal duties, on entering the Temple of Life, to
search our hearts for the little fox with the sharp tooth. When we find
ourselves about to enter upon a course of action, either momentary or
long continuous, which will be adverse to another of our
fellow-creatures, let us ask: "Is there anything of envy in this act?"
If there be, let us refrain from acting--the soul is not yet pure, the
body fragrant.

Let us see how ignorant this contemptible quality of envy becomes under
the lenses of practical life. "Base envy withers at another's joy." What
has caused it? In nine cases out of every ten, it is simply the
one-sid