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"A fine house, fine furniture, a fine camel, and a fine horse, are all enjoyed with fear and trembling, lest they should excite envy and bring misfortune. A butcher would be afraid to expose fine meat, lest the evil eye of passers-by, who might covet it, should taint it, and make it spoil, or become unwholesome.'

"Children are supposed to be peculiarly the objects of desire and admiration. When they are suffered to go abroad, they are intentionally dirty and ill-dressed; but generally they are kept at home, without air or exercise, but safe from admiration. This occasions a remarkable difference between the infant mor‐ tality in Europe and in Egypt. In Europe it is the children of the rich who live; in Egypt, it is the children of the poor. The children of the poor cannot be confined. They live in the clover fields. As soon as you quit the city, you see in every field a group, of which the centre is a tethered buffalo, and round it are the children of its owner, with their provision of bread and water, sent thither at sunrise and to remain there till sunset, basking in the sun, and breathing the air from the desert. The Fellah children enter their hovels only to sleep, and that only in the winter. In summer, their days and nights are passed in the open air; and, notwithstanding their dirt and their bad food, they grow up healthy and vigorous. The children of the rich, confined by the fear of the evil eye to the 'hareem' are puny creatures, of whom not a fourth part reaches adolescence. Achmed Pasha Tahir, one of the governors of Cairo under Mehemet Ali, had 280 children; only six survived him. Mehemet Ali himself had 87; only ten were living at his death.'

"I believe,' he added, 'that at the bottom of this superstition is an enormous prevalence of envy among the lower Egyptians. You see it in all their fictions. Half of the stories told in the coffee-shops by the professional story-tellers, of which the Arabian Nights are a specimen, turn on malevolence. Malevolence, not attributed, as it would be in European fiction, to some insult or injury inflicted by the person who is its object, but to mere envy: envy of wealth, or of the other means of enjoyment, honourably acquired and liberally used." (Pages 10-11.)

In Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, the following

admirable remarks are made on the envy that attends a sudden rise:

'The man who, by some sudden revolution of fortune, is lifted up all at once into a condition of life greatly above what he had formerly lived in, may be assured that the congratulations of his best friends are not all of them perfectly sincere. An upstart, though of the greatest merit, is generally disagreeable, and a sentiment of envy commonly prevents us from heartily sympathizing with his joy. If he has any judgment, he is sensible of this, and instead of appearing to be elated with his good fortune, he endeavours, as much as he can, to smother' his joy, and keep down that elevation of mind with which his new circumstances naturally inspire him. He affects the same plainness of dress, and the same modesty of behaviour, which became him in his former station. He redoubles his attention to his old friends, and endeavours more than ever to be humble, assiduous, and complaisant. And this is the behaviour which in his situation we must approve of; because, we expect, it seems, that he should have more sympathy with our envy and aversion to his happiness, than we have with his happiness. It is seldom that with all this he succeeds. We suspect the sincerity of his humility, and he grows weary of this constraint. In a little time, therefore, he generally leaves all his old friends behind him, some of the meanest of them excepted, who may, perhaps, condescend to become his dependents: nor does he always acquire any new ones; the pride of his new connections is as much affronted at finding him their equal, as that of his old ones had been by his becoming their superior: and it requires the most obstinate and persevering modesty to atone for this mortification to either. He generally grows weary too soon, and is provoked, by the sullen and suspicious pride of the one, and by the saucy contempt of the other, to treat the first with neglect, and the second with petulance, till at last he grows habitually insolent, and forfeits the esteem of all. If the chief' part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved, as I believe it does, those sudden changes of fortune seldom contribute much to happiness. He is happiest who advances more gradually to greatness; whom the Public destines to every step of his preferment long before he arrives at it; in whom, upon that account, when it comes, it can excite no ex

travagant joy, and with regard to whom it cannot reasonably create either any jealousy in those he overtakes, or any envy in those he leaves behind."

'Persons of eminent virtue, when they are advanced, are less envied!

Bacon might have remarked that, in one respect a rise by merit exposes a man to more envy than that by personal favour, through family connection, private friendship, &c. For in this latter case, the system itself of preferring private considerations to public, is chiefly blamed, but the individual thus advanced is regarded much in the same way as one who is born to an estate or a title. But when any one is advanced on the score of desert and qualifications, the system is approved, but the individual is more envied, because his advancement is felt as an affront to all who think themselves or their own friends more worthy. It is quite right to advance men of great merit; but by this rule, it is I, or my friend So-and-so that should have been preferred.' When, on the other hand, a bishop or a minister appoints his own son or private friend to some office, every one else is left free to think 'If it had gone by merit, I should have been the man.'

When any person of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the clamour and abuse by which he is assailed, is but the sign and accompaniment of his success in doing service to the Public. And if he is a truly wise man, he will take no more notice of it than the moon does of the howling of the dogs. Her only answer to them is 'to shine on.'

This public envy seemeth to bear chiefly upon principal officers or ministers, rather than upon kings.'

This is a very just remark, and it might have suggested an excellent argument (touched on in the Lessons on the British Constitution') in favour of hereditary Royalty. It is surely a good thing that there should be some feeling of loyalty unalloyed

1 Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, chap. v.
'See Introductory Lessons on the British Constitution, lesson i

by envy, towards something in the Government. And this feeling concentrates itself among us, upon the Sovereign. But in a pure Republic, the abstract idea of the State-the Commonwealth itself is too vague for the vulgar mind to take hold of with any loyal affection. The President, and every one of the public officers, has been raised from the ranks; and the very circumstance of their having been so raised on the score of supposed fitness, makes them (as was observed above) the more obnoxious to envy, because their elevation is felt as an affront to their rivals.

An hereditary Sovereign, on the other hand, if believed to possess personal merit, is regarded as a Godsend; but he does not hold his place by that tenure.

In Aristotle's Rhetoric, there is a Dissertation on Envy, Emulation, and Indignation (Nemesis), well worthy of Bacon; who certainly was carried away into an undue neglect and disparagement of Aristotle by the absurd idolatry of which he had been made the object.

'Conculcatur enim cupide nimis ante metutum.'

133871A

THE

ESSAY X. OF LOVE.

HE stage is more beholding' to love than the life of Man; for as to the stage, love is even matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief, sometimes like a syren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or recent), there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love; which shows that great spirits and great business do keep out this weak passion. You must except, nevertheless, Marcus Antonius, the half-partner of the empire of Rome, and Appius Claudius, the decemvir and lawgiver; whereof the former was indeed a voluptuous man, and inordinate, but the latter was an austere and wise man and therefore it seems (though rarely,) that love can find entrance, not only into an open heart, but also into a heart well fortified, if watch be not well kept. It is a poor saying of Epicurus, 'Satis magnum alter alteri theatrum sumus," -as if Man, made for the contemplation of heaven, and all noble objects, should do nothing but kneel before a little idol, and make himself a subject, though not of the mouth (as beasts are), yet of the eye, which was given him for higher purposes.

It is a strange thing to note the excess of this passion, and how it braves the nature and value of things by this, that the speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love; neither is it merely in the phrase; for whereas it hath been well said, 'That the arch flatterer, with whom all the petty flatterers have intelligence, is a man's self:' certainly the lover is more; for there was never a proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved; and therefore it was well said, 'That it is impossible to love and be wise." Neither doth this weakness appear to others only, and not to the party loved, but to the loved most of all, except the

1 Beholding. Beholden.

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Thanks, lovely Virgins, now might we but know

To whom we had been beholden for this love.'-Ford.

We are a sufficiently great spectacle to each other.'

Amare et sapere vix Deo conceditur.'-Pub. Syr. Sent. 15.

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