318 A UTILITARIAN.-CARELESSNESS. rude health, warm heart, and distance from the Metropolis; but producing a strong sense of relief on your part when you find your hand released and your fingers unbroken. The next to this is the retentive shake,one which, beginning with vigour, pauses as it were to take breath, but without relinquishing its prey, and before you are aware begins again, till you feel anxious as to the result, and have no shake left in you. There are other varieties, but this is enough for one lesson.[Memoir.] MISS FOX. MISS Fox was mentioned, who was at that time at Bowood: "Oh, she is perfection; she always gives me the idea of an aged angel." A UTILITARIAN. He is of the Utilitarian school. That man is so hard you might drive a broad-wheeled waggon over him, and it would produce no impression; if you were to bore holes in him with a gimlet, I am convinced sawdust would come out of him. That school treat mankind as if they were mere machines; the feelings or affections never enter into their calculations. If everything is to be sacrificed to utility, why do you bury your grandmother at all? why don't you cut her into small pieces at once, and make portable soup of her?-[Memoir.] CARELESSNESS. I ALWAYS say to young people, Beware of carelessness, no fortune will stand it long; you are on the high road to ruin, the moment you think yourself rich enough to be careless.[Memoir.] VALUE OF GOOD MANNERS. 319 VALUE OF BEAUTY. NEVER teach false morality. How exquisitely absurd to tell girls that beauty is of no value, dress of no use! Beauty is of value; her whole prospects and happiness in life may often depend upon a new gown or a becoming bonnet, and if she has five grains of common sense she will find this out. The great thing is to teach her their just value, and that there must be something better under the bonnet than a pretty face for real happiness. But never sacrifice truth. [Memoir.] VALUE OF GOOD MANNERS. MANNERS are often too much neglected; they are most important to men, no less than to women. I believe the English are the most disagreeable people under the sun; not so much because Mr. John Bull disdains to talk, as that the respected individual has nothing to say, and because he totally neglects manners. Look at a French carter; he takes off his hat to a neighbour carter, and inquires after "la santé de madame," with a bow that would not have disgraced Sir Charles Grandison; and I have often seen a French soubrette with a far better manner than an English duchess. The true point at which a sensible girl should aim in manners is to be well-behaved without being insipid. It is far better nevertheless to fail in the latter than in the former point; but life is too short to get over a bad manner; besides, manners are the shadows of virtue.—[Memoir.] FALLACIES OF SOCIETY. Ir is astonishing the influence foolish apothegms have upon the mass of mankind, though they are not 320 FALLACIES OF LIFE. unfrequently fallacies. Here are a few I amused myself with writing, long before Bentham's book on Fallacies. Fallacy I.-Because I have gone through it, my son shall go through it also. A MAN gets well pummelled at a public school; is subject to every misery and every indignity which seventeen years of age can inflict upon nine and ten; has his eye nearly knocked out, and his clothes stolen and cut to pieces; and twenty years afterwards, when he is a chrysalis, and has forgotten the miseries of his grub state, is determined to act a manly part in life, and says, "I passed through all that myself, and I am determined my son shall pass through it as I have done:" and away goes his bleating progeny to the tyranny and servitude of the long chamber or the large dormitory. It would surely be much more rational to say, "Because I have passed through it, I am determined my son shall not pass through it; because I was kicked for nothing, and cuffed for nothing, and fagged for everything, I will spare all these miseries to my child." It is not for any good which may be derived from this rough usage; that has not been weighed and considered; few persons are capable of weighing its effects into character; but there is a sort of compensatory and consolatory notion, that the present generation (whether useful or not, no matter) are not to come off scot-free, but are to have their share of ill-usage; as if the black eye and bloody nose which Master John Jackson received in 1800, are less black and bloody by the application of similar violence to similar parts of Master Thomas Jackson, the son, in 1830. This is not only sad nonsense, but cruel nonsense. The only use to be derived from the recollection of what we have suffered in youth, FALLACIES OF LIFE. 321 is a fixed determination to screen those we educate from every evil and inconvenience, from subjection to which there are not cogent reasons for submitting. Can any thing be more stupid and preposterous than this concealed revenge upon the rising generation, and latent envy lest they should avail themselves of the improvements time has made, and pass a happier youth than their fathers have done? Fallacy II.-I have said I will do it, and I will do it; I will stick to my word. THIS fallacy proceeds from confounding resolutions with promises. If you have promised to give a man a guinea for a reward, or to sell him a horse or a field, you must do it; you are dishonest if you do not. But if you have made a resolution to eat no meat for a year, and everybody about you sees that you are doing mischief to your constitution, is it any answer to say, you have said So, and you will stick to your word? With whom have you made the contract but with yourself? and if you and yourself, the two contracting parties, agree to break the contract, where is the evil, or who is injured? Fallacy III. "I object to half measures, · it is neither one thing nor the other." BUT why should it be either one thing or the other? why not something between both? Why are halfmeasures necessarily or probably unwise measures? I am embarrassed in my circumstances ;-one of my plans is, to persevere boldly in the same line of expense, and to trust to the chapter of accidents for some increase of fortune; the other is, to retire entirely from the world, and to hide myself in a cottage;-but I end with Y 322 THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. doing neither, and take a middle course of diminished expenditure. I do neither one thing nor the other, but possibly act wiser than if I had done either. I am highly offended by the conduct of an acquaintance; I neither overlook it entirely nor do I proceed to call him out; I do neither, but show him, by a serious change of manner, that I consider myself to have been ill-treated. I effect my object by half-measures. I cannot agree entirely with the Opposition or the Ministry; it may very easily happen that my half-measures are wiser than the extremes to which they are opposed. But it is a sort of metaphor which debauches the understanding of foolish people; and when half-measures are mentioned, they have much the same feeling as if they were cheated-as if they had bargained for a whole bushel and received but half. To act in extremes is sometimes wisdom; to avoid them is sometimes wisdom; every measure must be judged of by its own particular circumstances. [Memoir.] MATRIMONY. DID you ever hear my definition of marriage? It is, that it resembles a pair of shears, so joined that they cannot be separated; often moving in opposite directions, yet always punishing any one who comes between them. -[Memoir.] THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. I always prophesied his greatness from the first moment I saw him, then a very young and unknown man, on the Northern Circuit. There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great; he is like a book in breeches Yes, I agree, he |