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guilty of the present hour. You may indeed observe in people of pleasure a certain complacency and absence of all severity, which the habit of a loose unconcerned life gives them; but tell the man of pleasure your secret wants, cares, or sorrows, and you will find he has given up the delicacy of his passions to the cravings of his appetites. He little knows the perfect joy he loses, for the disappointing gratifications which he pursues. He looks at pleasure as she approaches, and comes to him with the recommendation of warm wishes, gay looks, and graceful motion; but he does not observe how she leaves his presence with disorder, impotence, downcast shame, and conscious imperfection. She makes our youth inglorious, our age shameful. In all orders of men, wherever this is the chief character, the person who wears it is a negligent friend, father, and husband, and entails poverty on his unhappy descendants. Mortgages, diseases, and settlements are the legacies a man of wit and pleasure leaves to his family. Irresolution and procrastination in all a man's affairs, are the natural effects of being addicted to pleasure: Dishonour to the Gentleman and Bankruptcy to the Trader, are the portion of either whose chief purpose of life is delight. The chief cause that this pursuit has been in all ages
