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is continually wasting. Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost for ever to India. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him. Were we to be driven out of India this day, nothing would remain to tell that it had been possessed, during the inglorious period of our dominion, by anything better than the ourang-outang or the tiger. There is nothing in the boys we send to India worse than in the boys whom we are whipping at school, or that we see trailing a pike, or bending over a desk at home. But as English youth in India drink the intoxicating draught of authority and dominion before their heads are able to bear it, and as they are full grown in fortune long before they are ripe in principle, neither nature nor reason have any opportunity to exert themselves for remedy of the excesses of their premature power. Their prey is lodged in England; and the cries of India are given to seas and winds, to be blown about, in every breaking up of the monsoon, over a remote and unhearing ocean. Arrived in England, the destroyers of the nobility and gentry of a whole kingdom will find the best company in this nation, at a board of elegance and hospitality. They marry into your families; they enter into your senate; they ease your estates by loans; they raise their value by demand; and they protect your relations which lie heavy on your patronage; and there is scarcely a house in the kingdom that does not feel some concern and interest that makes all reform of our eastern government appear officious and disgusting. In such an attempt you hurt those who are able to return kindness, or to resent injury. If you succeed, you save those who cannot so much as give you thanks.

E. BURKE

371. PAINFUL MEMORY OF DEPARTED FOLLY. It is remarkable that those whom the world least accuses, accuse themselves the most; and that a foolish speech, which at the time of its utterance was unobserved as such by all who heard it, shall yet remain fixed in the memory of him who pronounced it, with a tenacity which he vainly seeks to communicate to more agreeable subjects of reflection. It is also remarkable, that whilst our own foibles, or our imagined exposure of them to others, furnish the most frequent subject of almost nightly regret, yet we rarely recall to recollection our acts of consideration for the feelings of others, or

those of kindness and benevolence. These are not the familiar friends of our memory, ready at all times to enter the domicile of mind, its unbidden but welcome guests. When they appear, they are usually summoned at the command of reason, from some unexpected ingratitude, or when the mind retires within its council-chamber to nerve itself for the endurance or the resistance of injustice.

C. BABBAGE

372. CLOSE OF BURKE'S LAST SPEECH ON THE IMPEACHMENT OF WARREN HASTINGS. This war, my lords, we have waged for twenty-two years, and the conflict has been fought at your lordships' bar for the last seven years. My lords, twenty-two years is a great space in the life of man-it is no inconsiderable space in the history of a great nation. A business which has so long occupied the councils and tribunals of Great Britain, cannot possibly be huddled over in the course of vulgar, trite, and transitory events. Nothing but some of those great revolutions, that break the traditionary chain of human memory, and alter the very face of nature itself, can possibly obscure it. My lords, we are all elevated to a degree of importance by it; the meanest of us will, by means of it, more or less, become the concern of posterity, if we are yet to hope for such a thing in the present state of the world, as a recording retrospective civilized posterity. But this is in the hands of the great Disposer of events; it is not ours to settle how it shall be. My lords, your House yet stands it stands as a great edifice; but let me say that it stands in the midst of ruins, that have been made by the greatest moral earthquake that ever convulsed and shattered this globe of ours. My lords, it has pleased Providence to place us in such a state, that we appear every moment to be upon the verge of some great mutations. There is one thing and one only which defies all mutation—that which existed before the world, and will survive the fabric of the world itself—I mean justice; that justice which, emanating from the Divinity, has a place in the breast of every one of us, given us for our guide with regard to ourselves and with regard to others, and which will stand, after this globe is burned to ashes, our advocate or our accuser before the great Judge when He comes to call upon us for the tenor of a wellspent life.

E. BURKE

373.

He was

CHARACTER OF KING JAMES THE FIRST. deeply learned, without possessing useful knowledge; sagacious in many individual cases without having real wisdom: fond of his power and desirous to maintain and augment it, yet willing to resign the direction of that and of himself to the most unworthy favourites: a big and bold assertor of his rights in words, yet one who tamely saw them trampled on in deeds; a lover of negotiations in which he was always outwitted; and one who feared war where conquest might have been easy. He was fond of his dignity, while he was perpetually degrading it by undue familiarity; capable of much public labour, yet often neglecting it for the meanest amusement; a wit, though a pedant; and a scholar, though fond of the conversation of the ignorant and uneducated. Even his timidity of temper was not uniform; and there were moments of his life, and those critical, in which he shewed the spirit of his ancestors.

374. OF DISSIMULATION. Tacitus saith: Livia sorted well with the arts of her husband and dissimulation of her son; attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius. And again, when Mucianus encourageth Vespasian to take arms against Vitellius, he saith: We rise not against the piercing judgment of Augustus, nor the extreme caution or closeness of Tiberius. These properties of arts or policy, and dissimulation or closeness, are indeed habits and faculties, several, and to be distinguished. For if a man have that penetration of judgment, as he can discern what things are to be laid open and what to be secreted and what to be shewn at half-lights, and to whom, and when, (which indeed are arts of a state, and arts of life, as Tacitus well calleth them,) to him a habit of dissimulation is a hindrance and a poorness. But if a man cannot obtain to that judgment, then it is left to him generally to be close and a dissembler. For where a man cannot choose or vary in particulars, there it is good to take the safest and wariest way in general; like the going softly by one that cannot well see. Certainly the ablest men that ever were have had all an openness and frankness of dealing, and a name of certainty and veracity. But then they were like horses well managed; for they could tell passing well when to stop or turn. And at such times, when they thought the case indeed required dissimulation, if then they used it, it came to pass, that the

former opinion spread abroad of their good faith and clearness of dealing made them almost invisible.

LORD BACON

375.

GULLIVER PULLING THE SHIPS OF THE BLEFUSCUDIANS INTO THE ROYAL PORT OF LILLIPUT. The emperor

and his whole court stood on the shore expecting the issue of this great adventure. They saw the ships move forward in a large half-moon, but could not discern me, who was up to my breast in water. When I advanced to the middle of the channel, they were yet more in pain because I was under water to my neck. The emperor concluded me to be drowned, and that the enemy's flect was approaching in a hostile manner: but he was soon eased of his fears, for the channel growing shallower every step I made, I came in a short time within hearing, and holding up the end of the cable by which the fleet was fastened, I cried in a loud voice, Long live the most puissant emperor of Lilliput!

ABLE.

J. SWIFT

376. DESIRE OF PERFECTION-NOT ALWAYS COMMENDThe modern English mind has this much in common with that of the Greek, that it intensely desires, in all things, the utmost completion or perfection compatible with their nature. This is a noble character in the abstract, but becomes ignoble when it causes us to forget the relative dignities of that nature itself, and to prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher; not considering that as, judged by such a rule, all the brute animals would be preferable to man, because more perfect in their functions and kind, and yet are always held inferior to him, so also in the works of man, those which are more perfect in their kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings.XFor the finer the nature, the more flaws it will shew through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And therefore, while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty pro

gress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success.

377. LETTER. Sir Clement tells me you will shortly come to town. We begin to want comfort in a few friends around us, while the winds whistle, and the waters roar. The sun gives a parting look, but 'tis but a cold one; we are ready to change those distant favours of a lofty beauty, for a gross material fire that warms and comforts more. I wish you could be here till your family come to town; you'll live more innocently, and kill fewer harmless creatures, nay none, except by your proper deputy, the butcher. It is fit for conscience' sake that you should come to town, and that the duchess should stay in the country, where no innocents of another species may suffer by her. I advise you to make man your game, hunt and beat about here for coxcombs, and truss up rogues in satire : I fancy they'll turn to a good account, if you can produce them fresh, or make them keep: and their relations will come and buy their bodies of you.

378.

But

They spring

SUCCESSIVE GROWTH AND DECAY OF PLANTS. all plants sooner or later must submit to death. up, they grow, they flourish, they bear fruit, and having finished their course, return to the dust again. Almost all the black mould which covers the earth is owing to dead vegetables. Indeed, after the leaves and stems are gone, the roots of plants remain: but these too at last rot and change into mould. And the earth, thus prepared, restores to plants what it has received from them. For when seeds are com

mitted to the earth they draw and accommodate to their own nature the more subtle parts of this mould; so that the tallest tree is in reality nothing but mould compounded with air and water. And from these plants, when they die, just the same kind of mould is formed as gave them birth. By this means fertility remains continually uninterrupted: whereas the earth could not make good its annual consumption, were it not constantly recruited.

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