If three men were to have their legs and arms broken, and were to remain all night exposed to the inclemency of weather, the whole country would be in a state of the most dreadful agitation. Look at the wholesale death of a field of battle, ten acres covered with dead, and half dead, and dying; and the shrieks and agonies of many thousand human beings. There is more of misery inflicted upon mankind by one year of war, than by all the civil peculations and oppressions in a century. Yet it is a state into which the mass of mankind rush with the greatest avidity, hailing official murderers, in scarlet, gold, and cock's feathers, as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures. It is the business of every wise and good man to set himself against this passion for military glory, which really seems to be the most fruitful source of human misery.-[E. R. 1813.] FREQUENCY OF WARS. ALAS! we have been at war thirty-five minutes out of every hour since the peace of Utrecht.-[E. R. 1827.] QUAKERS' CHARITY. QUAKERS, it must be allowed, are a very charitable and humane people. They are always ready with their money, and, what is of far more importance, with their time and attention for every variety of human misfortune.-[E. R. 1814.] MAD QUAKERS. A MAD Quaker belongs to a small and rich sect; and is, therefore, of greater importance than any other mad person of the same degree in life.—[E. R. 1814.] FRANCE AND ENGLAND.-LONDON. 99 FRANCE AND ENGLAND. THE prejudices of the English nation have proceeded a good deal from their hatred to the French; and, because that country is the native soil of elegance, animation, and grace, a certain patriotic solidity, and loyal awkward ness, have become the characteristics of this.-[E. R. 1802.] FORBIDDEN FRUIT. A FRENCHWOMAN seems almost always to have wanted the flavour of prohibition, as a necessary condiment to human life. The provided husband was rejected, and the forbidden husband introduced in ambiguous light, through posterns and secret partitions. The thing wanted was the wrong man, the gentleman without the ring the master unsworn to at the altarthe person unconsecrated by priests 'Oh! let me taste thee unexcis'd by kings.' -[E. R. 1818.] LOVE OF LONDON. VERY few men who have gratified, and are gratifying their vanity in a great metropolis, are qualified to quit it. Few have the plain sense to perceive, that they must soon inevitably be forgotten,-or the fortitude to bear it when they are.-[E. R. 1818.] OBLIVION IN LONDON. IN London, as in Law, de non apparentibus, et non existentibus, eadem est ratio.[E. R. 1818.] 100 ROUSSEAU.-RAILWAY TRAVELLING. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU seems, as the reward of genius and fine writing, to have claimed an exemption from all moral duties. He borrowed and begged and never paid; -put his children in a poor house-betrayed his friends -insulted his benefactors- and was guilty of every species of meanness and mischief. His vanity was so great, that it was almost impossible to keep pace with it by any activity of attention; and his suspicion of all mankind amounted nearly, if not altogether, to insanity. -[E. R. 1818.] FASHIONABLE PHYSICIANS. THERE is always some man, of whom the human viscera stand in greater dread than of any other person, who is supposed, for the time being, to be the only person who can dart his pill into their inmost recesses; and bind them over, in medical recognisance, to assimilate and digest. In the Trojan war, Podalirius and Machaon were what Dr. Baillie and Sir Henry Halford now are— they had the fashionable practice of the Greek camp; and, in all probability, received many a guinea from Agamemnon dear to Jove, and Nestor the tamer of horses.-[E. R. 1818.] RAILWAY TRAVELLING. RAILROAD travelling is a delightful improvement of human life. Man is become a bird; he can fly longer and quicker than a Solan goose. The mamma rushes sixty miles in two hours to the aching finger of her conjugating and declining grammar boy. The early RAILWAY ACCIDENTS. 101 Scotchman scratches himself in the morning mists of the North, and has his porridge in Piccadilly before the setting sun. The Puseyite priest, after a rush of 100 miles, appears with his little volume of nonsense at the breakfast of his bookseller. Every thing is near, every thing is immediate-time, distance, and delay are abolished. But, though charming and fascinating as all this is, we must not shut our eyes to the price we shall pay for it. There will be every three or four years some dreadful massacre—whole trains will be hurled down a precipice, and 200 or 300 persons will be killed on the spot. There will be every now and then a great combustion of human bodies, as there has been at Paris; then all the newspapers up in arms a thousand regulations, forgotten as soon as the directors dare-loud screams of the velocity whistle-monopoly locks and bolts, as before.-[Letter on Railways.] RAILWAY ACCIDENTS. We have been, up to this point, very careless of our railway regulations. The first person of rank who is killed will put every thing in order, and produce a code of the most careful rules. I hope it will not be one of the bench of bishops; but should it be so destined, let the burnt bishop-the unwilling Latimer-remember that, however painful gradual concoction by fire may be, his death will produce unspeakable benefit to the public. Even Sodor and Man will be better than nothing. From that moment the bad effects of the monopoly are destroyed; no more fatal deference to the directors; no despotic incarceration; no barbarous inattention to the anatomy and physiology of the human body; no com 102 FRANCIS HORNER.-GOOD TASTE. mitment to locomotive prisons with warrant. We shall then find it possible THERE was something very remarkable in his countenance-the commandments were written on his face, and I have often told him there was not a crime he might not commit with impunity, as no judge or jury who saw him would give the smallest degree of credit to any evidence against him: there was in his look a calm settled love of all that was honourable and good—an air of wisdom and of sweetness; you saw at once that he was a great man, whom nature had intended for a leader of human beings; you ranged yourself willingly under his banners and cheerfully submitted to his sway. The character of his understanding was the exercise of vigorous reasoning, in pursuit of important and difficult truth. He had no wit; nor did he condescend to that inferior variety of this electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of Wut, is so infinitely distressing to persons of good taste. -[Letter to L. Horner.] GOOD TASTE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS. THE House of Commons, as a near relation of mine once observed, has more good taste than any man in it. [Letter to L. Horner.] |
