"Chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy."

Shakspeare.

"A choking gall and a preserving sweet."

Shakspeare.

"I languish with these bitter sweet extremes."

Quarles.

"Secrets of marriage still are sacred held;
Their sweet and bitter by the wise conceal'd."

Dryden.

“Discord oft in music makes the sweeter lay."

Like east and west become the same;
No Indian prince has to his palace

More followers, than a thief to the gallows."

Butler.

"For as extremes are short of ill or good,
And tides at highest mark regorge the flood:
So fate, that could no more improve their joy,
Took a malicious pleasure to destroy."

Dryden.

"There's but the twinkling of a star

Between a man of peace

and war;

A thief and justice, fool and knave;
A huffing officer and a slave,
A crafty lawyer and pickpocket,
A great philosopher and blockhead,
A formal preacher and a player,
A learned physician and manslayer;
As wind in th' hypocondries pent
Is but a blast, if downward sent;
But if it upwards chance to fly,
Becomes new light and prophecy."

Butler.

"Extremes in Nature equal ends produce, And oft so mix, the difference is too nice, Where ends the virtue or begins the vice."

"Still where rosy pleasure leads,

See a kindred grief pursue;
Behind the steps that misery treads
Approaching comfort view:
The hues of bliss more brightly glow,
Chastised by sabler tints of woe,
And, blended, form with artful strife
The strength and harmony of life."

"Loveliness

Needs not the foreign aid of ornament,

Pope.

Gray.

But is, when unadorn'd, adorn'd the most."

Thomson.

"The heaviest raining is the briefest shower."

Beddoes.

The truth and beauty of this sentiment are

further illustrated by Martial's Epigram:

"Difficilis, facilis, jucundus, acerbus es idem;

Nec tecum possum vivere, nec sine te."

By Junius's remark :

"Your majesty may learn hereafter how nearly the slave and the tyrant are allied."

And by the following passage in Robespierre's Report to the Convention, on the 23rd December, 1793:

"Tyrants have wished to throw us back into servitude by moderation; sometimes they aim at the same object by throwing us into the opposite extreme. These two extremes terminate in the same point. The fanatic covered with his relics, and the fanatic who preaches atheism, are closely allied."

Richter, in "Levana," has a couple of places to the same purpose:

"Stiff citizen manners occupy only the middle place; the extremities approach one another so closely, that in the highest ranks the freedom of the savage is renewed."

"Boys, when approaching near to manhood, shew the least affection, the most love of teasing, the greatest destructiveness, the most selfishness and cold-heartedness; just as the coldness of the night increases twofold shortly before the rising of the sun."

A very striking application of this image occurs in an Essay on the "Uses of Adversity," by Herman Hooker, an American writer :

“A pious lady who had lost her husband, was for a time inconsolable. She could not think, scarcely could she speak of anything but him. Nothing seemed to take her attention but the three promising children he had left her, singing to her his presence, his look, his love. But soon these were all taken ill, and died within a few days of each other; and now

the childless mother was calmed even by the greatness of the stroke. As the lead that goes quickly down to the ocean's depth ruffles its surface less than lighter things, so the blow which was strongest did not so much disturb her calm of mind, but drove her to its proper trust."

We close our examples here. It is of the sentiment which we have thus endeavoured to illustrate, that Coleridge says:

"Extremes meet;—a proverb, by the by, to collect and explain all the instances and exemplifications of which, would constitute and exhaust all philosophy."-The Friend.

Our next sample of an "Idée Napoléonienne' is the famous exclamation, "La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas!" said to have been uttered at Waterloo. As at Pavia Francis the First found consolation for the loss of the battle in the remark, "tout est perdu hormis l'honneur; so, at Waterloo, when "sauve qui peut" became the order of the day, it was no small cause of exultation to the vanquished to be able to boast that their famous "Garde" preferred death to dishonour. The French plume themselves on this saying, not only as an indignant protest against the loss of the battle, but as containing one of those happy transpositions, which invest a thought with peculiar significance and force. When La Fontaine makes the reed say:

"Je plie et ne romps pas,"

the ideas follow each other in their natural order; and we conceive at once, that if there

were any breaking, it would follow the bending as a consequence. But in "La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas," there is a striking energy in placing death as the foremost object in the contemplation of the soldier.

This saying has been ascribed to almost every man that played a conspicuous part on the side of the French at Waterloo, but more commonly to General Cambronne. I believe, however, that it can be traced to a much higher source, and that it is at best but a feeble version of the memorable words uttered by one of Virgil's heroes:

Another celebrated maxim, the pretended emanation of modern wisdom, is attributed to Prince Talleyrand, namely:

"La parole n'a été donnée à l'homme que pour déguiser sa pensée."

The saying is certainly quite in keeping with the genius of that accomplished master in the art of dissimulation; and if he was not the first to propound it, he was the foremost to practise its Machiavelism. Political tergiversation was the grand rule of his life, and every step in his extraordinary career was designed to illustrate a system of deceit, in which nothing was undisguised but the intention to disguise.