Number XI. complete. First Series of “Personal Meditations.”

THERE goes a tradition of Ovid, that famous poet (receiving some countenance from his own confession), that when his father was about to beat him for following the pleasant but profitless study of poetry, he, under correction, promised his father never to make a verse, and made a verse in his very promise. Probably the same in sense, but certainly more elegant for composure, than this verse which common credulity hath taken up:—

    When I so solemnly promise my Heavenly Father to sin no more, I sin in my very promise; my weak prayers made to procure my pardon increase my guiltiness. Oh, the dullness and deadness of my heart therein! I say my prayers as the Jews eat the Passover,—in haste. And whereas in bodily actions motion is the cause of heat; clean contrary, the more speed I make in my prayers the colder I am in my devotion.