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did but seal once to a thing, and I was never mine own man since.-Shakspeare.

DCCXLVI.

I have often been puzzled to assign a cause why women should have the talent of ready utterance in so much greater perfection than men. I have sometimes fancied that they have not a retentive power, or the faculty of suppressing their thoughts, as men have, but that they are necessitated to speak every thing they think; and if so, it would perhaps furnish a very strong argument to the Cartesians for the supporting of their doctrine that the soul always thinks. But as several are of opinion that the fair sex are not altogether strangers to the art of dissembling and concealing their thoughts, I have been forced to relinquish that opinion, and have therefore endeavoured to seek after some better reason. In order to it, a friend of mine, who is an excellent anatomist, has promised me by the first opportunity to dissect a woman's tongue and to examine whether there may not be in it certain juices which render it so wonderfully voluble or flippant, or whether the fibres of it may not be made up of a finer or more pliant thread; or whether there are not in it some particular muscles which dart it up and down by such sudden glances and vibrations; or whether, in the last place, there may not be certain undiscovered channels running from the head and the heart to this little instrument of loquacity, and conveying into it a perpetual affluency of animal spirits. Nor must I omit the reason which Hudibras has given, why those who can talk on trifles speak with the greatest fluency; namely, that the tongue is like a racehorse which runs the faster the lesser weight it carries. Which of these reasons soever may be looked upon as the most probable, I think the Irishman's thought was very natural, who, after some hours' conversation with a female orator, told her, that he believed her tongue was very glad when she was asleep, for that it had not a moment's rest all the while she was awake-Addison.

DCCXLVII.

The rich are wise:

He that upon his back rich garments wears,
Is wise, though on his head grow Midas' ears:
Gold is the strength, the sinews of the world;
The health, the soul, the beauty most divine;
A mask of gold hides all deformities;

Gold is heav'n's physic, life's restorative.

DCCXLVIII.

Dekker.

I take it for a rule, that the natural, and not the acquired man, is the companion. Learning, wit, gallantry, and good-breeding, are all but subordinate qualities in society, and are of no value, but as they are subservient to benevolence, and tend to a certain manner of being or appearing equal to the rest of the company; for conversation is composed of an assembly of men, as they are men, and not as they are distinguished by fortune: therefore he who brings his quality with him into conversation, should always pay the reckoning: for he came to receive homage, and not to meet his friends.-Tatler.

DCCXLIX.

Creditors have better memories than debtors; and creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times.-Franklin.

DCCL.

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It is the mild and quiet half of the world, who are generally outraged and borne down by the other half of it; but in this they have the advantage; whatever be the sense of their wrongs, that pride stands not so watchful a sentinel over their forgiveness, as it does in the breasts of the fierce and forward; we should all of us, I believe, be more forgiving than we are, would the world but give us leave; but it is apt to interpose its ill offices in remissions, especially of this kind: the truth is, it has its laws, to which the heart is not always a party; and acts so like an unfeeling engine in all cases without distinction, that it requires all the firmness of the most settled humanity to bear up against it.-Sterne.

DCCLI.

False critics rail at false wits, as quacks and impostors are still cautioning us to beware of counterfeits, and decry other cheats only to make more way for their own.Pope.

DCCLII.

There is nothing for which such numbers think themselves qualified as for theatrical exhibition. Every human being has an action graceful to his own eye, a voice musical to his own ear, and a sensibility which nature forbids him to know that any other bosom can excel. An art in which such numbers fancy themselves excellent, and which the puplic liberally rewards, will excite many competitors, and in many attempts there must be many miscarriages.-Johnson.

DCCLIII.

Does the mayor of a corporation make a speech, he is instantly set down for a great man. Does a pedant digest his common-place book into a folio, he quickly becomes great. Does a poet string up trite sentiments in rhyme, he also becomes the great man of the hour. How diminutive soever the object of admiration, each is followed by a crowd of still more diminutive admirers. The shout begins in his train, onward he marches towards immortality, looks back at the pursuing crowd with self-satisfaction; catching all the oddities, the whimsies, the absurdities, and the littlenesses of conscious greatness by the way.-Goldsmith.

DCCLIV.

Daughter of time, sincere posterity,

Always new-born, yet no man knows thy birth,
The arbitress of pure sincerity,

Yet changeable (like Proteus) on the earth,
Sometime in plenty, sometime join'd with dearth:
Always to come, yet always present here,
Whom all run after, none come after here.

Impartial judge of all, save present state,
Truth's idioma of the things are past,

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But still pursuing present things with hate,
And more injurious at the first than last,
Preserving others, while their own do waste:
True treasurer of all antiquity,

Whom all desire, yet never one could see.

From England's Parnassus.

DCCLV.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.-Johnson.

DCCLVI.

A little neglect may breed great mischief; for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost; being overtaken and slain by an enemy, all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.-Franklin.

DCCLVII.

Fear is cousin-german, or rather sister, to sorrow, her fidus Achates, constant companion, chief assistant, and principal agent in procuring this mischief. What Virgil says of the harpies may be truly applied to these twin destroyers:

Monsters more fierce offended heav'n ne'er sent,
From hell's abyss, for human punishment.

DCCLVIII.

Beauty's our grief, but in the ore,
We mint, we stamp, and then adore:
Like heathen we the image crown,
And indiscreetly then fall down.

DCCLIX.

Burton.

Cartwright.

The good yeoman is a gentleman in ore, whom the next age may see refined; and is the wax capable of a gentill impression, when the prince shall stamp it. Wise Solon (who accounted Tellus the Athenian the most hap

py man for living privately on his own lands) would surely have pronounced the English yeomanry a fortunate condition, living in the temperate zone, betwixt greatnesse and want, an estate of people almost peculiar to England. France and Italy are like a die, which hath no points, between sink and ace, nobility and pesantry. Their walls, though high, must needs be hollow, wanting filling stones. Indeed Germany hath her boores, like our yeomen; but by a tyrannicall appropriation of nobility to some few ancient families, their yeomen are excluded from ever rising higher to clarifie their bloods. In England, the temple of honour is bolted against none, who have passed through the temple of virtue: nor is a capacity to be gentill denyed by our yeoman, who thus behaves himself.-Fuller.

DCCLX.

I have often thought that no man should be permitted to take relief from the parish, or to ask it in the street, until he has first purchased as much as possible of his own livelihood by the labour of his own hands: and then the public ought only to be taxed to make good the deficiency. If this rule was strictly observed, we should see every where such a multitude of new labourers, as would in all probability reduce the prices of all our manufac tures.-Budgell.

DCCLXI.

Physic is of little use to a temperate person, for a man's own observation on what he finds does him good, and what hurts him, is the best physic to preserve health. Lord Bacon.

DCCLXII.

The most notable way of managing a controversy, is that which we may call arguing by torture. These disputants convince their adversaries with a sorites, commonly called a pile of faggots. The rack is also a kind of syllogism which has been used with good effect, and has made multitudes of converts. Men were formerly disputed out of their doubts, reconciled to truth by force of reason, and won over to opinions by the candour,

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