TO THE MISERABLE. CHILDREN of misfortune, wheresoever found, and whatsoever enduring,-ye who, arrogating to yourselves a kind of sovereignty in suffering, maintain, that all the throbs of torture, all the pungency of sorrow, all the bitterness of desperation, are your ownwho are so torn and spent with the storms and struggles of mortality, as to faint, or freeze, even at the personation of those ruined Wretches, whose Stories wash the stage of tragedy with tears and blood-approach a more disastrous scene! Take courage to behold a Pageant of calamities, which calls you to renounce your sad monopoly. Dispassionately ponder all your worst of woes, in turn with these; then hasten to distil from the comparison an opiate for your fiercest pangs; [vi] and learn to recognise the lenity of your Destinies, if they have spared you from the lightest of those mightier and more grinding agonies, which claim to be emphatically characterized as "The Miseries of Human Life;"-miseries, which excruciate the minds and bodies of none more insupportably, than of those Heroes in anguish, those writhing Martyrs to the plagues and frenzies of vexation, whose trembling hands must shortly cease to trace the names of TIMOTHY TESTY, SAMUEL SENSITIVE.* *The above address, written by Mr. Sensitive, was heartily subscribed by his companion. |