MCXVII Persons are oftentimes misled in regard to their choice of dress, by attending to the beauty of colours, rather than selecting such colours as may increase their own beauty.Shenstone. MCXVIII. It is the same with understanding as with eyes: to a certain size and make just so much light is necessary, and no more. Whatever is beyond, brings darkness and confusion.-Shaftesbury. MCXIX. If we look into the behaviour of ordinary partisans, we shall find them acting after the example of the wild Tartars, who are ambitious of destroying a man of the most extraordinary parts and accomplishments, as thinking that upon his decease the same talents, whatever post they qualified him for, enter of course into his destroyer. Addison. MCXX. An oven that is stopp'd, or river staid, Burneth more hotly, swelleth with more rage; MCXXI. Many species of wit are quite mechanical: these are the favourites of witlings, whose fame in words scarce outlives the remembrance of their funeral ceremonies.Zimmerman. MCXXII. Let us seriously reflect of what a pudding is composed: it is composed of flour, that once waved in the golden grain, and drank the dews of the morning,-of milk pressed from the swelling udder by the gentle hand of the beauteous milk maid, whose beauty and innocence might have recommended a worse draught, who, while she stroked the udder, indulged no ambitious thoughts of wandering in palaces, formed no plans for destruction of her fellow creatures;-milk, which is drawn from the cow, that useful animal that eats the grass of the field, and supplies us with that which made the greatest part of the food of mankind in the age which the poets have agreed to call golden. It is made with an egg, that miracle of nature, which the theoretical Burnett has compared to creation. An egg contains within its beautiful smooth surface an unformed mass, which, by incubation of the parent, becomes a regular animal, furnished with bones and sinews, and covered with feathers.-Let us consider, can there be more wanting to complete the meditation on a pudding; if more is wanting, more may be found: it contains salt, which keeps the sea from putrefaction-salt, which is made the image of intellectual excellence, contributes to the foundation of a pudding. -Johnson. MCXXIII. Cares, both in kind and degree, are as innumerable as the sands of the seashore; and the fable which Hyginus has so pleasantly constructed on this subject, shows that man is their proper prey. "Care," says he, "crossing a dangerous brook, collected a mass of the dirty slime which deformed its banks, and moulded it into the image of an earthly being, which Jupiter, on passing by soon afterwards, touched with ethereal fire, and warmed into animation; but, being at a loss what name to give this new production, and disputing to whom of right it be longed, the matter was referred to the arbitrament of Saturn, who decreed that his name should be MAN, Homo ab humo, from the dirt of which he had been made; that care should entirely possess his mind while living; that Tellus, or the earth, should receive his body when dead; and that Jupiter should dispose of his celestial essence according to his discretion. Thus was man made the property of care from his original formation; and discontent, the offspring of care, has ever since been his inseparable companion.”—Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. MCXXIV. Love can be founded upon nature only, or the appearance of it, for this reason; however a peruke may tend to soften the human features, it can very seldom make amends for the mixture of artifice which it discovers.Shenstone. MCXXV. In nature, all is managed for the best with perfect frugality and just reserve, profuse to none, but bountiful to all; never employing on one thing more than enough, but with exact economy retrenching the superfluous, and adding force to what is principal in every thing.Shaftesbury. MCXXVI. A library pharmaceutically disposed, would have the appearance of a dispensatory, and might be properly enough so called; and when I recollect how many of our eminent collectors of books have been of the medical faculty, I cannot but think it probable that those great benefactors to literature, Radcliffe, Meade, Sloane, Hunter, and others, have had this very idea in their minds, when they founded their libraries.-Cumberland. MCXXVII. The world is made up, for the most part, of fools, or knaves, both irreconcilable foes to truth: the first being slaves to a blind credulity, which we may properly call bigotry: the last are too jealous of that power they have usurped over the folly and ignorance of the others, which the establishment of the empire of reason would destroy. For truth, being made so plain and easy to all men, would render the designs and arts of knaves of little use in those opinions, which set the world at odds, and by the feuds they maintain, enrich those who in a charitable peaceful world must starve.-Buckingham. MCXXVIII. Mankind have a great aversion to intellectual labour, but even supposing knowledge to be easily attainable, more people would be content to be ignorant than would take even a little trouble to acquire it.-Johnson. MCXXIX. The summer's flower is to the summer sweet, For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds; A degenerate noble, or one that is proud of his birth, is like a turnip; there is nothing good of him but that which is under ground; or rhubarb, a contemptible shrub, that springs from a noble root. He has no more title to the worth and virtue of his ancestors, than the worms that were engendered in their dead bodies; and yet he believes he has enough to exempt himself and his posterity from all things of that nature for ever. This makes him glory in the antiquity of his family, as if his nobility were the better the farther off it is in time, as well as desert, from that of his predecessors. He believes the honour that was left him, as well as the estate, is sufficient to support his quality, without troubling himself to purchase any more of his own; and he meddles as little with the management of the one as the other, but trusts both to the government of his servants, by whom he is equally cheated in both. He supposes the empty title of honour sufficient to serve his turn, though he has spent the substance and reality of it; like the fellow that sold his ass, but would not part with the shadow of it; or Apicius, that sold his house, and kept only the balcony, to see and be seen in. And because he is privileged from being arrested for his debts, he supposes he has the same freedom from all obligations he owes humanity and his country, because he is not punishable for his ignorance and want of honour, no more than poverty or unskilfulness is in other professions, which the law supposes to be punishment enough to itself. He is like a fanatic, that contents himself with the mere title of a saint, and makes that his privilege to act all manner of wickedness; or the ruins of a noble structure, of which there is nothing left but the foundation, and that obscured and buried under the rubbish of the superstructure. The living honour of his ancestors is long ago departed, dead and gone; and his is but the ghost and shadow of it, that haunts the house with horror and disquiet, where once it lived. His nobility is truly descended from the glory of his forefathers, and may be rightly said to fall to him: for it will never rise again to the height it was in them by his means; and he succeeds them as candles do the office of the sun. The confidence of nobility has rendered him ignoble, as the opinion of wealth makes some men poor; and as those that are born to estates neglect industry, and have no business but to spend; so he, being born to honour, believes he is no farther concerned, than to consume and waste it. He is but a copy, and so ill done, that there is no line of the original in him, but the sin only.-Butler. MCXXXI. Of all mortals a critic is the silliest; for, by inuring himself to examine all things, whether they are of consequence or not, he never looks upon any thing but with a design of passing sentence upon it; by which means he is never a companion, but always a censor.Steele. MCXXXII. Love sees what no eye sees; love hears what no ear hears; and what never rose in the heart of man love prepares for its object.-Lavater. MCXXXIII. The mind and body must be continually in exercise, and therefore dancing, singing, masking, mumming, however severely they may be censured by the Catos of the age, are, if opportunely and soberly used, extremely beneficial in the cure of melancholy. Melius est fodere quam saltare, says St. Austin; and Tully insists Nemo saltat sobrius: but these are the observations of men to whom age and infirmities had rendered all youthful pastimes unpleasant and disagreeable. Let the world I say, have their may-games, wakes, witsunales; their dancings |
