Chapter 75

Printed by T. andA. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the Edinburgh University Press

1. Those essays which are now republished for the first time are indicated by an asterisk.

2. This essay was apparently not published inThe Atlas.

3. Scroggins said of the Gas-man, that he thought he was a man of that courage, that if his hands were cut off, he would still fight on with the stumps—like that of Widrington,———‘In doleful dumps,Who, when his legs were smitten offStill fought upon his stumps.’

3. Scroggins said of the Gas-man, that he thought he was a man of that courage, that if his hands were cut off, he would still fight on with the stumps—like that of Widrington,—

——‘In doleful dumps,Who, when his legs were smitten offStill fought upon his stumps.’

——‘In doleful dumps,

Who, when his legs were smitten off

Still fought upon his stumps.’

4. ‘The gentle and free passage of arms at Ashby’ was, we are told, so called by the Chroniclers of the time, on account of the feats of horsemanship and the quantity of knightly blood that was shed. This last circumstance was perhaps necessary to qualify it with the epithet of ‘gentle,’ in the opinion of some of these historians. I think the reason why the English are the bravest nation on earth is, that the thought of blood or a delight in cruelty is not the chief excitement with them. Where it is, there is necessarily areaction; for though it may add to our eagerness and savage ferocity in inflicting wounds, it does not enable us to endure them with greater patience. The English are led to the attack or sustain it equally well, because they fight as they box, not out of malice, but to show pluck and manhood.Fair play and old England for ever!This is the only bravery that will stand the test. There is the same determination and spirit shown in resistance as in attack; but not the same pleasure in getting a cut with a sabre as in giving one. There is, therefore, always a certain degree of effeminacy mixed up with any approach to cruelty, since both have their source in the same principle,viz.an over-valuing of pain.[67]This was the reason the French (having the best cause and the best general in the world) ran away at Waterloo, because they were inflamed, furious, drunk with the blood of their enemies, but when it came to their turn, wanting the same stimulus, they were panic-struck, and their hearts and their senses failed them all at once.

5. The English are fond of change of scene; the French of change of posture; the Italians like to sit still and do nothing.

6. Bells are peculiar to England. They jingle them in Italy during the carnival as boys do with us at Shrovetide; but they have no notion of ringing them. The sound of village bells never cheers you in travelling, nor have you the lute or cittern in their stead. The expression of ‘Merry Bells’ is a favourite and not one of the least appropriate in our language.

7. The strict formality of French serious writing is resorted to as a foil to the natural levity of their character.

8. See Newgate Calendar for 1758.

9. B—— at this time occupied chambers in Mitre court, Fleet Street.

10. Lord Bacon is not included in this list, nor do I know where he should come in. It is not easy to make room for him and his reputation together. This great and celebrated man in some of his works recommends it to pour a bottle of claret into the ground of a morning, and to stand over it, inhaling the perfumes. So he sometimes enriched the dry and barren soil of speculation with the fine aromatic spirit of his genius. His ‘Essays’ and his ‘Advancement of Learning’ are works of vast depth and scope of observation. The last, though it contains no positive discoveries, is a noble chart of the human intellect, and a guide to all future inquirers.

11. As when a person asks you ‘whether you do not find a strong resemblance between Rubens’s pictures and Quarles’s poetry?’—which is owing to the critic’s having lately been at Antwerp and bought an edition of Quarles’s Emblems. Odd combinations must take place where a number of ideas are brought together, with only a thin, hasty partition between them, and without a sufficient quantity of judgment to discriminate. An Englishman, of some apparent consequence passing by the St. Peter Martyr of Titian at Venice, observed ‘It was a copy of the same subject by Domenichino at Bologna.’ This betrayed an absolute ignorance both of Titian and of Domenichino, and of the whole world of art: yet unless I had also seen the St. Peter at Bologna, this connoisseur would have had the advantage of me, two to one, and might have disputed the precedence of the two pictures with me, but that chronology would have come to my aid. Thus persons who travel from place to place, and roam from subject to subject, make up by the extent and discursiveness of their knowledge for the want of truth and refinement in their conception of the objects of it.

12. There are few things more contemptible than the conversation of meremen of the town. It is made up of the technicalities and cant of all professions, without the spirit or knowledge of any. It is flashy and vapid, or is like the rinsings of different liquors at a night-cellar instead of a bottle of fine old port. It is without body or clearness, and a heap of affectation. In fact, I am very much of the opinion of that old Scotch gentleman who owned that ‘he preferred the dullest book he had ever read to the most brilliant conversation it had ever fallen to his lot to hear!’

13. Is this a verbal fallacy? Or in the close, retired, sheltered scene which I have imagined to myself, is not the sunflower a natural accompaniment of the sun-dial?

14.‘Once more, companion of the lonely hour,I’ll turn thee up again.’Bloomfield’s Poems—The Widow to her Hour-glass.

14.

‘Once more, companion of the lonely hour,I’ll turn thee up again.’Bloomfield’s Poems—The Widow to her Hour-glass.

‘Once more, companion of the lonely hour,

I’ll turn thee up again.’

Bloomfield’s Poems—The Widow to her Hour-glass.

15. Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on the imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning ‘Le son des cloches m’a toujours singulièrement affecté,’ &c.

16. I have heard it said that carpenters, who do every thing by the square and line, are honest men, and I am willing to suppose it. Shakspeare, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ makes Snug the Joiner themoralman of the piece.

17. Mr. Bentham proposes to new-model the penal code, on the principle of a cool and systematic calculation of consequences. Yet of all philosophers, the candidates for Panopticons and Penitentiaries are the most short-sighted and refractory. Punishment has scarcely any effect upon them. Thieves steal under the scaffold; and if a person’s previous feelings and habits do not prevent his running the risk of the gallows, assuredly the fear of consequences, or his having already escaped it, with all the good resolutions he may have made on the occasion, will not prevent his exposing himself to it a second time. It is true, most people have a natural aversion to being hanged. The perseverance of culprits in their evil courses seems a fatality, which is strengthened by the prospect of what is to follow. Mr. Bentham argues that all ‘men act from calculation, even madmen reason.’ So far it may be true that the world is not unlike a great Bedlam, or answers to the title of an old play—‘A Mad World, my masters!’ This is our world, but not his. Life, on looking back to it, too often resembles a disturbed dream, which does not infer its having been guided by reason in its progress.

18. [‘Have I not seen a household where love was not?’ says the author of the ‘Betrothed;’ ‘where, although there was worth and good will, and enough of the means of life, all was embittered by regrets, which were not only vain, but criminal?’—‘I would take theGhost’sword for a thousand pound,’ or in preference to that of any man living, though I was told in the streets of Edinburgh, that Dr. Jamieson, the author of the ‘Dictionary,’ was quite as great a man!]

19.Certesmore Whigs become Tories. This may also be accounted for satisfactorily, though not very rationally.

20. I have said somewhere, that all professions that do not make moneybreedare careless and extravagant. This is not true of lawyers, &c. I ought to have said that this is the case with all those that by the regularity of their returns do not afford a prospect of realizing an independence by frugality and industry.

21.‘Il a manqué au plus grand philosophe qu’aient eu les Francais, de vivre dans quelque solitude des Alpes, dans quelque séjour éloigné, et de lancer delà son livre dans Paris sans y venir jamais lui-même. Rousseau avait trop de sensibilité et trop peu de raison, Buffon trop d’hypocrisie à son jardin des plantes, Voltaire trop d’enfantillage dans la tête, pour pouvoir juger le principe d’Helvétius,’—De l’Amour, tom. 2. p. 230.My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal fallacy.

My friend Mr. Beyle here lays too much stress on a borrowed verbal fallacy.

22.Waverley, vol. iii. p. 201.

23. This lady is not, it is true, at Covent Garden: I wish she were!

24. ‘Mais vois la rapidité de cet astre qui vole et ne s’arrête jamais.’—New Eloise.

25. The thoughts of a captive can no more get beyond his prison-walls than his limbs, unless they are busied in planning an escape; as, on the contrary, what prisoner, after effecting his escape, ever suffered them to return there, or took common precautions to prevent his own? We indulge our fancy more than we consult our interest. The sense of personal identity has almost as little influence in practice as it has foundation in theory.

26. Taylor, of the Opera-House, used to say of Sheridan, that he could not pull off his hat to him in the street without its costing him fifty pounds; and if he stopped to speak to him, it was a hundred. No one could be a stronger instance than he was of what is calledliving from hand to mouth. He was always in want of money, though he received vast sums which he must have disbursed; and yet nobody can tell what became of them, for he paid nobody. He spent his wife’s fortune (sixteen hundred pounds) in a six weeks’ jaunt to Bath, and returned to town as poor as a rat. Whenever he and his son were invited out into the country, they always went in two post-chaises and four; he in one, and his son Tom following in another. This is the secret of those who live in a round of extravagance, and are at the same time always in debt and difficulty—they throw away all the ready money they get upon any newfangled whim or project that comes in their way, and never think of paying off old scores, which of course accumulate to a dreadful amount. ‘Such gain the cap of him who makes them fine, yet keeps his book uncrossed.’ Sheridan once wanted to take Mrs. Sheridan a very handsome dress down into the country, and went to Barber and Nunn’s to order it, saying he must have it by such a day, but promising they should have ready money. Mrs. Barber (I think it was) made answer that the time was short, but that ready money was a very charming thing, and that he should have it. Accordingly, at the time appointed she brought the dress, which came to five-and-twenty pounds, and it was sent in to Mr. Sheridan: who sent out a Mr. Grimm (one of his jackalls) to say he admired it exceedingly, and that he was sure Mrs. Sheridan would be delighted with it, but he was sorry to have nothing under a hundred pound bank-note in the house. She said she had come provided for such an accident, and could give change for a hundred, two hundred, or five hundred pound note, if it were necessary. Grimm then went back to his principal for farther instructions: who made an excuse that he had no stamped receipt by him. For this, Mrs. B. said, she was also provided; she had brought one in her pocket. At each message, she could hear them laughing heartily in the next room at the idea of having met with their match for once; and presently after, Sheridan came out in high good-humour, and paid her the amount of her bill, in ten, five, and one pounds. Once when a creditor brought him a bill for payment, which had often been presented before, and the man complained of its soiled and tattered state, and said he was quite ashamed to see it, ‘I’ll tell you what I’d advise you to do with it, my friend,’ said Sheridan, ‘take it home, and write it uponparchment!’ He once mounted a horse which a horse-dealer was shewing off near a coffee-house at the bottom of St. James’s-street, rode it to Tattersall’s, and sold it, and walked quietly back to the spot from which he set out. The owner was furious, swore he would be the death of him; and, in quarter of an hour afterwards they were seen sitting together over a bottle of wine in the coffee-house, the horse-jockey with the tears running down his face at Sheridan’s jokes, and almost ready to hug him as an honest fellow. Sheridan’s house and lobby were beset with duns every morning, who were told that Mr. Sheridan was not yet up, and shewn into the several rooms on each side of the entrance. As soon as he had breakfasted, he asked, ‘Are those doors all shut, John?’ and, being assured they were, marched out very deliberately between them, to the astonishment of his self-invited guests, who soon found the bird was flown. I have heard one of his old City friends declare, that such was the effect of his frank, cordial manner, and insinuating eloquence, that he was always afraid to go to ask him for a debt of long standing, lest he should borrow twice as much. A play had been put off one night, or a favourite actor did not appear, and the audience demanded to have their money back again: but when they came to the door, they were told by the check-takers there was none for them, for that Mr. Sheridan had been in the mean time, and had carried off all the money in the till. He used often to get the old cobbler who kept a stall under the ruins of Drury Lane to broil a beef-steak for him, and take their dinner together. On the night that Drury Lane was burnt down, Sheridan was in the House of Commons, making a speech, though he could hardly stand without leaning his hands on the table, and it was with some difficulty he was forced away, urging the plea, ‘What signified the concerns of a private individual, compared to the good of the state?’ When he got to Covent Garden, he went into the Piazza Coffee-house, to steady himself with another bottle, and then strolled out to the end of the Piazza to look at the progress of the fire. Here he was accosted by Charles Kemble and Fawcett, who complimented him on the calmness with which he seemed to regard so great a loss. He declined this praise, and said—‘Gentlemen, there are but three things in human life that in my opinion ought to disturb a wise man’s patience. The first of these is bodily pain, and that (whatever the ancient stoics may have said to the contrary) is too much for any man to bear without flinching: this I have felt severely, and I know it to be the case. The second is the loss of a friend whom you have dearly loved; that, gentlemen, is a great evil: this I have also felt, and I know it to be too much for any man’s fortitude. And the third is the consciousness of having done an unjust action. That, gentlemen, is a great evil, a very great evil, too much for any man to endure the reflection of; but that’ (laying his hand upon his heart,) ‘but that, thank God, I have never felt!’ I have been told that these were nearly the very words, except that he appealed to themens conscia rectivery emphatically three or four times over, by an excellent authority, Mr. Mathews the player, who was on the spot at the time, a gentleman whom the public admire deservedly, but with whose real talents and nice discrimination of character his friends only are acquainted. Sheridan’s reply to the watchman who had picked him up in the street, and who wanted to know who he was, ‘I am Mr. Wilberforce!’—is well known, and shews that, however frequently he might be at a loss for money, he never wanted wit!

27. In Scotland, it seems, the draught of ale or whiskey with which you commence the day, is emphatically called ‘taking yourmorning.’

28. Shylock’s lamentation over the loss of ‘his daughter and his ducats,’ is another case in point.

29. It is provoking enough, and makes one look like a fool, to receive a printed notice of a blank in the last lottery, with a postscript hoping for your future favours.

30. Fawcett’sArt of War, a poem, 1794.

31. Lady Wortley Montague says, in one of her letters, that ‘she would much rather be a richeffendi, with all his ignorance, than Sir Isaac Newton, with all his knowledge.’ This was not perhaps an impolitic choice, as she had a better chance of becoming one than the other, there being many rich effendis to one Sir Isaac Newton. The wish was not a very intellectual one. The same petulance of rank and sex breaks out every where in these “Letters.” She is constantly reducing the poets or philosophers who have the misfortune of her acquaintance, to the figure they might make at her Ladyship’s levee or toilette, not considering that the public mind does not sympathize with this process of a fastidious imagination. In the same spirit, she declares of Pope and Swift, that ‘had it not been for thegood-natureof mankind, these two superior beings were entitled, by their birth and hereditary fortune, to be only a couple of link-boys.’ Gulliver’s Travels, and the Rape of the Lock, go for nothing in this critical estimate, and the world raised the authors to the rank of superior beings, in spite of their disadvantages of birth and fortune,out of pure good-nature! So, again, she says of Richardson, that he had never got beyond the servants’ hall, and was utterly unfit to describe the manners of people of quality; till in the capricious workings of her vanity, she persuades herself that Clarissa is very like what she was at her age, and that Sir Thomas and Lady Grandison strongly resembled what she had heard of her mother and remembered of her father. It is one of the beauties and advantages of literature, that it is the means of abstracting the mind from the narrowness of local and personal prejudices, and of enabling us to judge of truth and excellence by their inherent merits alone. Woe be to the pen that would undo this fine illusion (the only reality), and teach us to regulate our notions of genius and virtue by the circumstances in which they happen to be placed! You would not expect a person whom you saw in a servants’ hall, or behind a counter, to write Clarissa; but after he had written the work, toprejudgeit from the situation of the writer, is an unpardonable piece of injustice and folly. His merit could only be the greater from the contrast. If literature is an elegant accomplishment, which none but persons of birth and fashion should be allowed to excel in, or to exercise with advantage to the public, let them by all means take upon them the task of enlightening and refining mankind: if they decline this responsibility as too heavy for their shoulders, let those who do the drudgery in their stead, however inadequately, for want of their polite example, receive the meed that is their due, and not be treated as low pretenders who have encroached on the province of their betters. Suppose Richardson to have been acquainted with the great man’s steward, or valet, instead of the great man himself, I will venture to say that there was more difference between him who lived in anideal world, and had the genius and felicity to open that world to others, and his friend the steward, than between the lacquey and the mere lord, or between those who lived in different rooms of the same house, who dined on the same luxuries at different tables, who rode outside or inside of the same coach, and were proud of wearing or of bestowing the same tawdry livery. If the lord is distinguished from his valet by any thing else, it is by education and talent, which he has in common with our author. But if the latter shews these in the highest degree, it is asked what are his pretensions? Not birth or fortune, for neither of these would enable him to write a Clarissa. One man is born with a title and estate, another with genius. That is sufficient; and we have no right to question the genius for want of thegentility, unless the former ran in families, or could be bequeathed with a fortune, which is not the case. Were it so, the flowers of literature, like jewels and embroidery, would be confined to the fashionable circles; and there would be no pretenders to taste or elegance but those whose names were found in the court list. No one objects to Claude’s Landscapes as the work of a pastrycook, or withholds from Raphael the epithet ofdivine, because his parents were not rich. This impertinence is confined to men of letters; the evidence of the senses baffles the envy and foppery of mankind. No quarter ought to be given to thisaristocratictone of criticism whenever it appears. People of quality are not contented with carrying all the external advantages for their own share, but would persuade you that all the intellectual ones are packed up in the same bundle. Lord Byron was a later instance of this double and unwarrantable style of pretension—monstrum ingens, biforme. He could not endure a lord who was not a wit, nor a poet who was not a lord. Nobody but himself answered to his own standard of perfection. Mr. Moore carries a proxy in his pocket from some noble persons to estimate literary merit by the same rule. Lady Mary calls Fielding names, but she afterwards makes atonement by doing justice to his frank, free, hearty nature, where she says ‘his spirits gave him raptures with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret, and his happy constitution made him forget every thing when he was placed before a venison pasty or over a flask of champagne.’ She does not want shrewdness and spirit when her petulance and conceit do not get the better of her, and she has done ample and merited execution on Lord Bolingbroke. She is, however, very angry at the freedoms taken with the Great;smells a ratin this indiscriminate scribbling, and the familiarity of writers with the reading public; and inspired by her Turkish costume, foretells a French or English revolution as the consequence of transferring the patronage of letters from thequalityto the mob, and of supposing that ordinary writers or readers can have any notions in common with their superiors.

32. Is it not this that frequently keeps artists alive so long,viz.the constant occupation of their minds with vivid images, with little of thewear-and-tearof the body?

33. ‘Laws are not like women, the worse for being old.’—The Duke of Buckingham’s Speech in the House of Lords, in Charles the Second’s time.

34. An expression borrowed from a voluble German scholar, who gave this as an excuse for not translating the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ into English. He might as well have said seriously, that theRule of Threein German was different from our’s. Mr. Taylor (the Platonist, as he was called) was a singular instance of a person in our time believing in the heathen mythology. He had a very beautiful wife. An impudent Frenchman, who came over to London, and lodged in the same house, made love to her, by pretending to worship her as Venus, and so thought to turn the tables on our philosopher. I once spent an evening with this gentleman at Mr. G. D.’s chambers, in Clifford’s inn, (where there was no exclusion of persons or opinions), and where we had pipes and tobacco, porter, and bread and cheese for supper. Mr. Taylor never smoked, never drank porter, and had an aversion to cheese. I remember he shewed with some triumph two of his fingers, which had been bent so that he had lost the use of them, in copying out the manuscripts of Proclus and Plotinus in a fine Greek hand. Such are the trophies of human pride! It would be well if our deep studies often produced no other crookedness and deformity! I endeavoured (but in vain) to learn something from the heathen philosopher as to Plato’s doctrine of abstract ideas being the foundation of particular ones, which I suspect has more truth in it than we moderns are willing to admit. Another friend of mine once breakfasted with Mr. D. (the most amiable and absent of hosts), when there was no butter, no knife to cut the loaf with, and the tea-pot was without a spout. My friend after a few immaterial ceremonies, adjourned to Peel’s coffee-house, close by, where he regaled himself on buttered toast, coffee, and the newspaper of the day (a newspaper possessed some interest when we were young); and the only interruption to his satisfaction was the fear that his host might suddenly enter, and be shocked at his imperfect hospitality. He would probably forget the circumstance altogether. I am afraid this veteran of the old school has not received many proofs of thearchaismof the prevailing taste; and that the corrections in his History of the University of Cambridge, have cost him more than the public will ever repay him for.

35. When a certain poet was asked if he thought Lord Byron’s name would live three years after he was dead, he answered, ‘Not three days, Sir!’ This was premature: it has lasted above a year. His works have been translated into French, and there is aCaffé Byronon the Boulevards. Think of aCaffé Wordsworthon the Boulevards!

36. Is not this partly owing to the disappointment of the public at finding any defect in their idol?

37. An old friend of mine, when he read the abuse and billingsgate poured out in certain Tory publications, used to congratulate himself upon it as a favourable sign of the times, and of the progressive improvement of our manners. Where we now called names, we formerly burnt each other at a stake; and all the malice of the heart flew to the tongue and vented itself in scolding, instead of crusades andauto-da-fés—the nobler revenge of our ancestors for a difference of opinion. An author now libels a prince; and, if he takes the law of him or throws him into gaol, it is looked upon as a harsh and ungentlemanly proceeding. He, therefore, gets a dirty Secretary to employ a dirty bookseller, to hire a set of dirty scribblers, to pelt him with dirt and cover him with blackguard epithets—till he is hardly in a condition to walk the streets. This is hard measure, no doubt, and base ingratitude on the part of the public, according to the imaginary dignity and natural precedence which authors take of kings; but the latter are men, and will have their revenge where they can get it. They have no longer their old summary appeal—their will may still be good—to the dungeon and the dagger. Those who ‘speak evil of dignities’ may, therefore, think themselves well off in being merelysent to Coventry; and, besides, if they havepluck, they can make a Parthian retreat, and shoot poisoned arrows behind them. The good people of Florence lift up their hands when they are shewn the caricatures in the Queen’s Matrimonial-Ladder, and ask if they are really a likeness of the King?

38. Properly,daubs.

39. Dr. Johnson has observed, that ‘strong passion deprives the lover of that easiness of address, which is so great a recommendation to most women.’ Is then indifference or coldness the surest passport to the female heart? A man who is much in love has not his wits properly about him: he can think only of her whose image is engraven on his heart; he can talk only of her; he can only repeat the same vows, and protestations, and expressions of rapture or despair. He may, by this means, become importunate and troublesome—but does he deserve to lose his mistress for the only cause that gives him a title to her—the sincerity of his passion? We may perhaps answer this question by another—Is a woman to accept of a madman, merely because he happens to fall in love with her? ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet,’ as Shakspeare has said, ‘are of imagination all compact,’ and must, in most cases, be contented with imagination as their reward. Realities are out of their reach, as well as beneath their notice.

40. Zoffani, a foreign artist, but who, by long residence in England, had got our habits of indolence and dilatoriness, was employed by the late King, who was fond of low comedy, to paint a scene for Reynolds’sSpeculation; in which Quick, Munden, and Miss Wallis were introduced. The King called to see it in its progress; and at last it was done—‘all but the coat.’ The picture, however, was not sent and the King repeated his visit to the artist. Zoffani with some embarrassment said, ‘It was done all but thegoat‘—‘Don’t tell me,’ said the impatient monarch; ‘this is always the way: you said it was done all but the coat the last time I was here.’—‘I said thegoat, and please your Majesty.’—‘Aye’ replied the King, ‘thegoator thecoat, I care not which you call it; I say I will not have the picture,’—and was going to leave the room, when Zoffani, in an agony, repeated, ‘It is thegoatthat is not finished,’—pointing to a picture of a goat that was hung up in a frame as an ornament to the scene at the theatre. The King laughed heartily at the blunder, and waited patiently till the goat was finished. Zoffani, like other idle people, was careless and extravagant. He made a fortune when he first came over here, which he soon spent: he then went out to India, where he made another, with which he returned to England, and spent also. He was an excellent theatrical portrait-painter, and has left delineations of celebrated actors and interesting situations, which revive the dead, and bring the scene before us.

41. When Lord Byron was cut by the great, on account of his quarrel with his wife, he stood leaning on a marble slab at the entrance of a room, while troops of duchesses and countesses passed out. One little, pert, red-haired girl staid a few paces behind the rest; and, as she passed him, said with a nod, ‘Aye, you should have married me, and then all this wouldn’t have happened to you!’

42. If it were a show of wild beasts, or a boxing-match, the reasoning might be somewhat different; though I do not know that it would. No people behave better than thegodsafter the play once begins.

43.‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,In his defence his servants are as boldAs if he had been made of beaten gold.’—Dryden.

43.

‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,In his defence his servants are as boldAs if he had been made of beaten gold.’—Dryden.

‘Of whatsoe’er descent his Godhead be,

Stock, stone, or other homely pedigree,

In his defence his servants are as bold

As if he had been made of beaten gold.’—Dryden.

44. Theywouldhave a king in spite of the devil. The image-worship of the Papists is a batch of the same leaven. The apishness of man’s nature would not let even the Christian Religion escape.

45. ‘In fact, the argument drawn from the supposed incapacity of the people against a representative Government, comes with the worst grace in the world from the patrons and admirers of hereditary government. Surely, if government were a thing requiring the utmost stretch of genius, wisdom, and virtue to carry it on, the office of King would never even have been dreamt of as hereditary, any more than that of poet, painter, or philosopher. It is easy here ‘for the Son to tread in the Sire’s steady steps.’ It requires nothing but the will to do it. Extraordinary talents are not once looked for. Nay, a person, who would never have risen by natural abilities to the situation of churchwarden or parish beadle, succeeds by unquestionable right to the possession of a throne, and wields the energies of an empire, or decides the fate of the world with the smallest possible share of human understanding. The line of distinction which separates the regal purple from the slabbering-bib is sometimes fine indeed; as we see in the case of the two Ferdinands. Any one above the rank of an ideot is supposed capable of exercising the highest functions of royal state. Yet these are the persons who talk of the people as a swinish multitude, and taunt them with their want of refinement and philosophy.’—Yellow Dwarf, p. 84.

46. A lady of quality abroad, in allusion to the gallantries of the reigning Prince, being told, ‘I suppose it will be your turn next?’ said, ‘No, I hope not; for you know it is impossible to refuse!’ What a satire on the court and fashionables! If this be true, female virtue in the blaze of royalty is no more than the moth in the candle, or ice in the sun’s ray. What will the great themselves say to it, in whom at this rate,——‘the same luck holds,They all are subjects, courtiers, and cuckolds!’Out upon it! We’ll not believe it. Alas! poor virtue, what is to become of the very idea of it, if we are to be told that every man within the precincts of a palace is anhypotheticalcuckold, or holds his wife’s virtue in trust for the Prince? We entertain no doubt that many ladies of quality have resisted the importunities of a throne, and that many more would do so in private life, if they had the desired opportunity: nay, we have been assured by several that a king would no more be able to prevail with them than any other man! If however there is any foundation for the above insinuation, it throws no small light on the Spirit of Monarchy, which by the supposition implies in it thevirtualsurrender of the whole sex at discretion; and at the same time accounts perhaps for the indifference shown by some monarchs in availing themselves of so mechanical a privilege.

——‘the same luck holds,They all are subjects, courtiers, and cuckolds!’

——‘the same luck holds,

They all are subjects, courtiers, and cuckolds!’

Out upon it! We’ll not believe it. Alas! poor virtue, what is to become of the very idea of it, if we are to be told that every man within the precincts of a palace is anhypotheticalcuckold, or holds his wife’s virtue in trust for the Prince? We entertain no doubt that many ladies of quality have resisted the importunities of a throne, and that many more would do so in private life, if they had the desired opportunity: nay, we have been assured by several that a king would no more be able to prevail with them than any other man! If however there is any foundation for the above insinuation, it throws no small light on the Spirit of Monarchy, which by the supposition implies in it thevirtualsurrender of the whole sex at discretion; and at the same time accounts perhaps for the indifference shown by some monarchs in availing themselves of so mechanical a privilege.

47. Some persons have asserted that the Scotch have no humour. It is in vain to set up this plea, since Smollett was a Scotchman.

48. This may be in part the reason of the blunder they have made in laying so much stress on what they call theCockney School in Poetry—as if the people in London were proud of that distinction, and really thought it a particular honour to get their living in the metropolis, as the Scottish ‘Kernes and Gallowglasses’ think it a wonderful step in their progress through life to be able to hire a lodging and payscot and lotin the good town of Edinburgh.

49. It was not always so. But by knocking on the head the Jacobite loyalty of the Scotch, their political integrity of principle has been destroyed and dissipated to all the winds of Heaven.

50. My father was one of those who mistook his talent after all. He used to be very much dissatisfied that I preferred his Letters to his Sermons. The last were forced and dry; the first came naturally from him. For ease, half-plays on words, and a supine, monkish, indolent pleasantry, I have never seen them equalled.

51. He complained in particular of the presumption of attempting to establish the future immortality of man ‘without’ (as he said) ‘knowing what Death was or what Life was’—and the tone in which he pronounced these two words seemed to convey a complete image of both.

52. He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa, by Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would of course understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.

53. Some years ago, a periodical paper was published in London, under the title of the Pic-Nic. It was got up under the auspices of a Mr. Fulke Greville, and several writers of that day contributed to it, among whom were Mr. Horace Smith, Mr. Dubois, Mr. Prince Hoare, Mr. Cumberland, and others. On some dispute arising between the proprietor and the gentlemen-contributors on the subject of an advance in the remuneration for articles, Mr. Fulke Greville grew heroic, and said, ‘I have got a young fellow just come from Ireland, who will undertake to do the whole, verse and prose, politics and scandal, for two guineas a week, and if you will come and sup with me to-morrow night, you shall see him, and judge whether I am not right in closing with him,’ Accordingly, they met the next evening, and theWRITER OF ALL WORKwas introduced. He began to make a display of his native ignorance and impudence on all subjects immediately, and no one else had occasion to say any thing. When he was gone, Mr. Cumberland exclaimed, ‘A talking potato, by God!’ The talking potato was Mr. Croker, of the Admiralty. Our adventurer shortly, however, returned to his own country, and passing accidentally through a town where they were in want of a ministerial candidate at an Election, the gentleman of modest assurance offered himself, and succeeded. ‘They wanted a Jack-pudding,’ said the father of the hopeful youth, ‘and so they chose my son.’ The case of the Duke of York and Mrs. Clarke soon after came on, and Mr. Croker, who is a dabbler in dirt, and an adept in love-letters, rose from the affair Secretary to the Admiralty, and the very ‘rose and expectancy of the fair State.’

54. The only friends whom we defend with zeal and obstinacy are our relations. They seem part of ourselves. We cannot shake them off till they are hanged, nor then neither! For our other friends we are only answerable, as long as we countenance them; and we therefore cut the connection as soon as possible. But who ever willingly gave up the good dispositions of a child, or the honour of a parent?

55. See Ada Reis.

56. This was necessary in Latin, where no order was observed in the words of a sentence: in English the juxtaposition generally determines the connection.

57.Quere, Is the vocative ever a case?

58. An identical proposition is not an inference; but all reasoning consists in inference, or in finding out one thing as implied in another. In comparing any two objects, I have nothing previously given and cannot predict the result; but having made the comparison, I have then something determined and fixed to go by; and what else I discover or imagine must be in conformity with this first knowledge. This coherence in propositions, or in the mind, is the force ofreason, whereby one idea acts as the ground-work or cause of another. If I apply B as a common measure to A and C, and find it the same with both, it follows that they are equal to one another; since otherwise I must suppose the same thing (B) to be equal to unequal things, which is impossible as long as I retain my senses, or more properly, my recollection. I have ascertained two lines to be of the length of a third; that length cannot differ from itself; and therefore having settled what the two lines are with respect to the third, I cannot conceive them to be different with respect to one another, without forgetting myself, or what I know of them. If I had no power of contemplating different propositions together, I could draw no such conclusion; the conclusion therefore results from this comprehensive power of the mind; and reason is the end or band that ties the bundle of our separate ideas, or the logicalfasciculustogether.

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