Part 55 (1/2)
My beloved pupils, there is a set of persons in the world, daily increasing, against whom you must be greatly on your guard; there is a fascination about them. They are people who declare themselves vehemently opposed to humbug,--fine, liberal fellows, clear-sighted, yet frank. When these sentiments arise from reflection, well and good,--they are the best sentiments in the world; but many take them up second hand.
They are very inviting to the indolence of the mob of gentlemen who see the romance of a n.o.ble principle, not its utility. When a man looks at everything through this dwarfing philosophy, everything has a great modic.u.m of humbug. You laugh with him when he derides the humbug in religion, the humbug in politics, the humbug in love, the humbug in the plausibilities of the world; but you may cry, my dear pupils, when he derides what is often the safest of all practically to deride,--the humbug in common honesty! Men are honest from religion, wisdom, prejudice, habit, fear, and stupidity; but the few only are wise; and the persons we speak of deride religion, are beyond prejudice, unawed by habit, too indifferent for fear, and too experienced for stupidity.
POPULAR WRATH AT INDIVIDUAL IMPRUDENCE.
You must know, my dear young friends, that while the appearance of magnanimity is very becoming to you, and so forth, it will get you a great deal of ill-will if you attempt to practise it to your own detriment. Your neighbours are so invariably, though perhaps insensibly, actuated by self-interest--self-interest--[Mr. Tomlinson is wrong here; but his ethics were too much narrowed to Utilitarian principles.--EDITOR.]--is so entirely, though every twaddler denies it, the axis of the moral world--that they fly into a rage with him who seems to disregard it. When a man ruins himself, just hear the abuse he receives; his neighbours take it as a personal affront!
DUM DEFLUAT AMNIS.
One main reason why men who have been great are disappointed, when they retire to private life, is this: Memory makes a chief source of enjoyment to those who cease eagerly to hope; but the memory of the great recalls only that public life which has disgusted them. Their private life hath slipped insensibly away, leaving faint traces of the sorrow or the joy which found them too busy to heed the simple and quiet impressions of mere domestic vicissitude.
SELF-GLORIFIERS.
Providence seems to have done to a certain set of persons--who always view their own things through a magnifying medium, deem their house the best in the world, their gun the truest, their very pointer a miracle--as Colonel Hanger suggested to economists to do; namely, provide their servants each with a pair of large spectacles, so that a lark might appear as big as a fowl, and a twopenny loaf as large as a quartern.
THOUGHT ON FORTUNE.
It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.
WIT AND TRUTH.
People may talk about fiction being the source of fancy, and wit being at variance with truth. Now, some of the wittiest things in the world are witty solely from their truth. Truth is the soul of a good saying.
”You a.s.sert,” observes the Socrates of modern times, ”that we have a virtual representation; very well, let us have a virtual taxation too!”
Here the wit is in the fidelity of the sequitur. When Columbus broke the egg, where was the wit? In the completeness of conviction in the broken egg.
AUTO-THEOLOGY.
Not only every sect but every individual modifies the general attributes of the Deity towards a.s.similation with his own character: the just man dwells on the justice, the stern upon the wrath; the attributes that do not please the wors.h.i.+pper he insensibly forgets. Wherefore, O my pupils, you will not smile when you read in Barnes that the pygmies declared Jove himself was a pygmy. The pious vanity of man makes him adore his own qualities under the pretence of wors.h.i.+pping those of his G.o.d.
GLORIOUS CONSt.i.tUTION.
A sentence is sometimes as good as a volume. If a man ask you to give him some idea of the laws of England, the answer is short and easy: In the laws of England there are somewhere about one hundred and fifty laws by which a poor man may be hanged, but not one by which he can obtain justice for nothing!