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we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative, and of the future nothing can be known. The truth is, that no mind is much employed upon the present; recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments. Our passions are joy and grief, love and hatred, hope and fear. Of joy and grief the past is the object, and the future of hope and fear; even love and hatred respect the past, for the cause must have been before the effect. The present state of things is the consequence of the former, and it is natural to inquire, what were the sources of the good that we enjoy, or the evil that we suffer. If we act only for ourselves, to neglect the study of history is not prudent; if we are entrusted with the care of others, it is not just. Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal: and he may properly be charged with evil, who refused to learn how he might prevent it.' S. JOHNSON

448. DESCRIPTION OF THE CAMPAGNA OF ROME UNDER EVENING LIGHT. Perhaps there is no more impressive scene on earth than the solitary extent of the Campagna of Rome under evening light. Let the reader imagine himself for a moment withdrawn from the sounds and motion of the living world, and sent forth alone into this wild and wasted plain. The earth yields and crumbles beneath his foot, tread he never so lightly, for its substance is white, hollow and curious, like the dusty wreck of the bones of men. The long knotted grass waves and tosses feebly in the evening wind, and the shadows of its motion shake feverishly along the banks of ruin that lift themselves to the sunlight. Hillocks of mouldering earth heave around him, as if the dead beneath were struggling in their sleep; scattered blocks of black stone, foursquare, remnants of mighty edifices, not one left upon another, lie upon them to keep them down. A dull purple, poisonous haze stretches level along the desert, veiling its spectral wrecks of mossy ruins, on whose rents the red light rests like lying fire on defiled altars. The blue ridge of the Alban mount lifts itself against a solemn space of green, clear, quiet, sky. Watch-towers of dark clouds stand steadfastly along the promontories of the Apennines. From the plain to the mountains, the shat

tered aqueducts, pier beyond pier, melt into the darkness, like shadowy and countless troops of funeral mourners, passing from a nation's grave.

J. RUSKIN

But if we should suppose

449. THE OCEAN DRIED UP. the ocean dry, and that we looked down from the top of some high cloud upon the empty shell, how horridly and barbarously would it look? and with what amazement should we see it under us like an open hell, or a wide bottomless pit? So deep and hollow and vast; so broken and confused, so every way deformed and monstrous. This would effectually awaken our imagination, and make us inquire and wonder how such a thing came in nature; from what causes, by what force, or engines, could the earth be torn in this prodigious manner? Did they dig the sea with spades, and carry out the moulds in hand-baskets? Where are the entrails laid? And how did they cleave the rocks asunder? If as many pioneers as the army of Xerxes had been at work ever since the beginning of the world, they could not have made a ditch of this greatness. Nor is it the greatness only, but that wild and multifarious confusion which we see in the parts and fashion of it, that makes it strange and unaccountable; it is another chaos in its kind; who can paint the scenes of it? Gulphs, and precipices, and cataracts; pits within pits, and rocks under rocks, broken mountains and ragged islands, that look as if they had been countries pulled up by the roots and planted in the sea.

T. BURNET

450. THE WORLD A HEAP OF RUINS. The shores and coasts of the sea are no way equal or uniform, but go in a line uncertainly crooked and broke; indented and jagged as a thing torn; besides the greater promontories and bays there are a multitude of creeks and outlets, necks of land and angles, which break the evenness of the shore in all manner of ways. Then the height and level of the shore is as uncertain as the line of it; it is sometimes high and sometimes low, sometimes spread in sandy plains, as smooth as the sea itself; and of such an equal height with it, that the waves seem to have no bounds, but the mere figure and convexity of the globe; in other places it is raised into banks and ramparts of earth, and in others it is walled in with

rocks; and all this without any order that we can observe, or any other reason than this is what might be expected in a ruin.

As to the depth and soundings of the sea, they are under no rule nor equality any more than the figures of the shores; shallows in some places and gulphs in others; beds of sand sometimes, and sometimes rocks under water. And though we that are upon dry land are not much concerned how the rocks and shelves lie in the sea, yet a poor shipwrecked mariner, when he hath run his vessel upon a rock in the middle of the channel, expostulates bitterly with nature, who it was that placed that rock there, and to what purpose? Was there not room enough, saith he, upon the land, or the shore, to lay your great stones, but they must be thrown into the middle of the sea, as it were in spite to navigation? The best apology that can be made for nature in this case, so far as I know, is to confess, that the whole business of the sea-channel is but a ruin, and in a ruin things tumble uncertainly and commonly lie in confusion.

T. BURNET

451. STORY OF MALCOLM III. KING OF SCOTLAND. Having received an information, that one of his nobles had conceived a design against his life, he enjoined the strictest silence to the informer and took no notice of it himself, till the person accused of this execrable treason came to his court, in order to execute his intention. The next morning, he went to hunt with all the train of his courtiers, and when they were got into the deepest woods of the forest, drew that nobleman away from the rest of the company and spoke to him thus; 'Behold! we are here alone, armed and mounted alike. Nobody sees or hears us, or can give either of us aid against the other. If then you are a brave man, if you have courage and spirit, perform your purpose; accomplish the promise you have made to mine enemies. If you think, I ought to be killed by you, when can you do it better? when more opportunely? when more manfully?-Have you prepared poison for me? that is a womanish treason.-Or would you murder me in my bed?-an adulteress could do that.-Or have you hid a dagger to stab me secretly? that is the deed of a ruffian.-Rather act like a soldier: act like a man; and fight with me hand to hand: that your treason may at least be free from baseness.' At these words, the traitor, as if he

had been struck with a thunderbolt, fell at his feet and implored his pardon. 'Fear nothing: you shall not suffer any evil from me:' replied the king; and kept his word. GEORGE LORD LYTTELTON

452.

OF AGRICULTURE. Almost all Poets, except those who were not able to eat bread without the bounty of great men, that is, without what they could get by flattering of them, have not only withdrawn themselves from the vices and vanities of the grand world into the innocent happiness of a retired life: but have commended and adorned nothing so much by their ever-living poems. Hesiod was the first or second poet in the world, that remains yet extant (if Homer, as some think, preceded him, but I rather believe they were contemporaries), and he is the first writer too of the art of husbandry: he has contributed, says Columella, not a little to our profession: I suppose he means not a little honour, for the matter of his instructions is not very important: his great antiquity is visible through the gravity and simplicity of his style. The most acute of all his sayings concerns our purpose very much, and is couched in the reverend obscurity of an oracle. Πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος, the half is more than the whole. The occasion of the speech is this: His brother Perses had by corrupting some great Men (βασιλήας δωροpayovs, great bribe-eaters, he calls them) gotten from him the half of his estate. It is no matter, says he, they have not done me so much prejudice, as they imagine:

Νήπιοι οὐδ ̓ ἴσασιν ὅσῳ πλέον ἥμισυ πάντος,

οὐδ ̓ ὅσον ἐν μαλάχῃ τε καὶ ἀσφοδέλῳ μέγ' ὄνειαρ
κρύψαντες γὰρ ἔχουσι θεοὶ βίον ἀνθρώποισι.

This I conceive to have been honest Hesiod's meaning.

A. COWLEY

453. THE PRAISE OF A COUNTRY LIFE. The day itself (in my opinion) seems of more length and beauty in the country, and can be better enjoyed, than any where else. There the years pass away calmly; and one day gently drives on the other, insomuch, that a man may be sensible of a certain satiety and pleasure from every hour, and may be said to feed upon time itself, which devours all other things. And although those that are employed in the managing and ordering of their own estates in the country have, otherwise,

viz. by that very employment, much more pleasure and delights than a citizen can possibly have, yet verily so it is, that one day spent in the recess and privacy of the country, seems more pleasant and lasting than a whole year at court. Justly, then, and most deservingly, shall we account them most happy with whom the sun stays longest and lends a larger day. The husbandman is always up and drest with the morning, whose dawning light, at the same instant of time, breaks over all the fields and chaseth away the darkness (which would hinder his early labours) from every valley. If his day's task keep him late in the fields, yet night comes not so suddenly upon him, but he can return home with the evening-star. Whereas, in towns and populous cities, neither the day, nor the sun, nor a star, nor the season of the year, can be well perceived. All which, in the country, are manifestly seen and occasion a more exact care and observation of seasons, that their labours may be in their appointed time, and their rewards accordingly.

H. VAUGHAN

454. QUALIFICATION OF WOMEN FOR RULE. Yet although the desire of ruling is thus pernicious to feminine goodness, it by no means follows, that when Providence imposes the duty of ruling on a woman, she is to shrink from the responsibility. When the law of succession or the course of events throws dominion into a lady's hands, the same ordaining Power that makes the duty can qualify the person for its performance. There is no intellectual unfitness for sway in the sex: and whatever of moral or physical weakness may pertain to it, may be more than compensated by fineness of tact, purity of inclination and the strength of good resolve. Indeed, when we consider how few women have attained sovereignty, and how large a proportion of those few have been great sovereigns (we wish more of them had been good women), we might almost conjecture that the politic faculties of the women were greater than those of the men. But the apparent superiority arises from the greater necessity for exertion and circumspection which the sex imposes, and the impossibility of weak women, in dangerous junctures, keeping possession of the seat at all.

H. COLERIDGE

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