I do not believe that those who undergo this very common change, voluntarily choose the lower description of pleasures in preference to the higher. I believe that before they devote themselves exclusively to the one, they have already become incapable of the other. Capacity for the nobler feelings is in most natures a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance;

and in the majority of young persons it speedily dies away if the occupation to which their position in life had devoted the, and the society intto which it has thrown the, are not favorale to keeping that higher capacity in exercise. Men lose their high aspirations as they lose their intellectual tastes, because they have time or opportunity for indulging them; and they addict themselves to inferior pleasures, not because they deliberately prefer them, but because they are either the only one to which they have access, or the only ones which they are any longer capable of learning.