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ment, which have been answered a hundred times over. These he kept by him ready cut and dried, and brought out in all companies with a zeal which would have done honour to a better cause, but which the friends to a better cause are not so apt to discover. He soon got all the cant of the new school. He prated about narrowness, and ignorance, and bigotry, and prejudice, and priestcraft, and tyranny, on the one hand; and on the other, of public good, the love of mankind, and liberality, and candour, and toleration, and, above all, benevolence. Benevolence, he said, made up the whole of religion, and all the other parts of it were nothing but cant, and jargon, and hypocrisy. By benevolence he understood a gloomy and indefinite anxiety about the happiness of people with whom he was utterly disconnected, and whom Providence had put it out of his reach either to serve or injure. And by the happiness this benevolence was so anxious to promote, he meant an exemption from the power of the laws, and an emancipation from the restraints of religion, conscience, and moral obligation. (From History of Mr. Fantom.)

A PLAIN MAN ON HIS DAUGHTER'S FAVOURITE

NOVELS

I COULD make neither head nor tail of it; it was neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring: it was all about my lord, and Sir Harry, and the Captain. But I never met with such nonsensical fellows in my life. Their talk was no more like that of my old landlord, who was a lord you know, nor the captain of our fencibles, than chalk is like cheese. I was fairly taken in at first, and began to think I had got hold of a godly book for there was a deal about hope and despair, and death, and heaven, and angels, and torments, and everlasting happiness. But when I got a little on, I found there was no meaning in all these words, or if any, it was a bad meaning. Eternal misery, perhaps, only meant a moment's disappointment about a bit of a letter; and everlasting happiness meant two people talking nonsense together for five minutes. In short, I never met with such a pack of lies. The people talk such wild gibberish as

no folks in their sober senses ever did talk; and the things that happen to them are not like the things that ever happen to me or any of my acquaintance. They are at home one minute, and beyond the sea the next; beggars to-day, and lords to-morrow; waiting-maids in the morning, and duchesses at night. Nothing happens in a natural gradual way, as it does at home; they grow rich by the stroke of a wand, and poor by the magic of a word; the disinherited orphan of this hour is the overgrown heir of the next: now a bride and bridegroom turn out to be a brother and sister, and the brother and sister prove to be no relations at all. You and I, Master Worthy, have worked hard many years, and think it very well to have scraped a trifle of money together; you a few hundreds, I suppose, and I, a few thousands. But one would think every man in these books had the bank of England in his escritoire. Then there is another thing which I never met with in true life. We think it pretty well, you know, if one has got one thing, and another has got another: I will tell you how I mean. You are reckoned sensible, our parson is learned, the squire is rich, I am rather generous, one of your daughters is pretty, and both mine are genteel. But in these books (except here and there one, whom they make worse than Satan himself), every man and woman's child of them, are all wise, and witty, and generous, and rich, and handsome, and genteel, and all to the last degree. Nobody is middling, or good in one thing and bad in another, like my live acquaintance; but it is all up to the skies, or down to the dirt. I had rather read Tom Hickathrift, or Jack the Giant Killer, a thousand times. (From The Two Wealthy Farmers.)

DRESS AND LITERATURE

LONDON, 1775

To a Sister. Our first visit was to Sir Joshua's, where we were received with all the friendship imaginable. I am going to-day to a great dinner ; nothing can be conceived so absurd, extravagant, and fantastical, as the present mode of dressing the head. Simplicity and modesty are things so much exploded, that the very names are no longer remembered. I have just escaped from one of the

most fashionable disfigurers; and though I charged him to dress me with the greatest simplicity, and to have only a very distant eye upon the fashion, just enough to avoid the pride of singularity, without running into ridiculous excess; yet in spite of all these sage didactics, I absolutely blush at myself, and turn to the glass with as much caution as a vain beauty just risen from the smallpox; which cannot be a more disfiguring disease than the present mode of dressing. Of the one, the calamity may be greater in its consequences, but of the other it is more corrupt in its cause. We have been reading a treatise on the morality of Shakespeare ; it is a happy and easy way of filling a book, that the present race of authors have arrived at—that of criticising the works of some eminent poet with monstrous extracts, and short remarks. It is a species of cookery I begin to grow tired of; they cut up their authors into chops, and by adding a little crumbled bread of their own, and tossing it up a little they present it as a fresh dish; you are to dine upon the poet ;-the critic supplies the garnish; yet has the credit, as well as profit, of the whole entertainment.

(From the Memoirs.)

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

. . . FOR about an hour nothing was uttered but words which are almost an equivalent to nothing. The gentleman had not yet spoken. The ladies with loud vociferations, seemed to talk much without thinking at all. The gentleman, with all the male stupidity of silent recollection, without saying a single syllable, seemed to be acting over the pantomime of thought. I cannot say, indeed, that his countenance so much belied his understanding as to express anything: no, let me not do him that injustice; he might have sat for the picture of insensibility. I endured his taciturnity, thinking that the longer he was in collecting, adjusting, and arranging his ideas, the more would he charm me with the tide of oratorical eloquence, when the materials of his conversation were ready for display; but alas! it never occurred that I have seen an empty bottle corked as well as a full one. After sitting another hour, I thought I perceived in Eim signs of pregnant sentiment which was just on the point of being delivered in speech. I was extremely exhilarated at this, but it

was a false alarm; he essayed it not. At length the imprisoned powers of rhetoric burst through the shallow mounds of torpid silence and reserve, and he remarked with equal acuteness of wit, novelty of invention, and depth of penetration, that—" we had had no summer." Then, shocked at his own loquacity, he double-locked the door of his lips, "and word spoke never (From the Same.)

more.

JEREMY BENTHAM

[Jeremy Bentham was born in London on the 15th of February 1748. He was educated at Westminster School and Queen's College, Oxford. In 1763 he became a member of Lincoln's Inn. In 1776 he published anonymously his first important work, the Fragment on Government. In 1789 he published his Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. He devoted the remainder of his life chiefly to applying the principles of this work to the amendment of particular branches of the law. Westminster Review was founded in 1823 at his expense and by his disciples. Bentham died in London on the 6th of June 1832. A collected edition of his works with a memoir of his life, filling eleven volumes, was published in 1843 by John Bowring, his literary executor.]

The

He had himself a

He saw human He could analyse In spite of his

BENTHAM was essentially a man of science, not a man of letters. Even as a child he did not care for books which did not afford him facts. In later life he condemned poetry on the ground that it was a misrepresentation of reality. strong logical faculty, but a weak imagination. nature in the abstract, not in the concrete. motives, but he could not depict character. genuine benevolence he had too little sympathy with men to judge his own contemporaries aright or to penetrate the secrets of history. His only vigorous passions were the intellectual passions of study and controversy. He led a tranquil life unruffled by sudden changes of fortune, by great joys or by great sorrows. A man so limited by his nature and by his circumstances could never have been a great literary artist. Had Bentham adopted the profession of letters, he might have written some vigorous pamphlets or newspaper articles, but he would not have left behind him anything to interest later generations.

Bentham, however, did not care for literary distinction. The reform of law was the supreme object of his ambition. Most of his works, having been written with this object, are technical rather than literary in character. They are taken up with minute

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