CCCXXXVII.

To day, in snow array'd, stern winter rules
The ravag'd plain-anon the teeming earth
Unlocks her stores, and spring adorns the year;
And shall not we-while fate, like winter frowns,
Expect revolving bliss?

CCCXXXVIII.

Smollett.

There is a kind of reparation and restitution that is a child of repentance; a fruit that repentance cannot choose but bear; which is repairing a man's reputation, restoring his good name, which he hath taken or endeavoured to take from him by calumnies and slanders; which is a greater robbery than plundering a man's house, or robbing him of his goods. If the tongue be sharp enough to give wounds, it must be at the charge of balsam to put into them; not only such as will heal the wound, but such as will wipe out the scar, and leave no mark behind it. Nor will private acknowledgment to the person injured, be any manifestation or evidence of repentance; fear may produce that, out of apprehension of chastisement; or good husbandry may dispose a man to it, to avoid the payment of great damages by the direction of justice and the law: but true repentance issues out of a higher court, and is not satisfied with submitting to the censures of public authority; but inflicts greater penalties than a common judge can do, because it hath a clearer view and prospect into the nature of the offence, discerns the malice of the heart, and every circumstance in the committing, and applies a plaister proportionable to the wound and to the scar. -Clarendon.

CCCXXXIX.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs;
O! then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

CCCXL.

Shakspeare.

The world will never be in any manner of order or tranquillity, until men are firmly convinced, that con

convinced,

VOL III.

H

science, honour, and credit, are all in one interest; and that without the concurrence of the former, the latter are but impositions upon ourselves and others.-Tatler. CCCXLI.

When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.-Burke.

CCCXLII.

Oh! rid me of this torture quickly there,
My madam with the everlasting voice;
The bells in time of pestilence ne'er made

Like noise, as were in that perpetual motion!

All my house

But now steam'd like a bath with her thick breath;
A lawyer could not have been heard, nor scarce
Another woman; such a hail of words

She has let fall.

Ben. Jonson's Silent Woman.

CCCXLIII.

True repentance is a very severe magistrate, and will strip off all that shelter and covering which would make the stripes to be less sensibly felt, and reckons shame an essential part of the punishment. It is a rough physician, that draws out the blood that inflames, and purges out the humours which corrupt or annoy the vitals; leaves no phlegm to cherish envy, nor no choler and melancholy to engender pride; and will rather reduce the body to a skeleton, than suffer those pernicious humours to have a source, from whence they may abound again to infest the body or the mind.-Clarendon.

CCCXLIV.

-Of all

Our passions, I wonder nature made

The worst, foul Jealously, her favourite:-
And if it be not so, why took she care

That ev'ry thing should give the monster nourishment,
And left us nothing to destroy it with?

Suckling,

CCCXLV.

Bestow thy youth so that thou mayst have comfort to remember it, when it hath forsaken thee, and not sigh and grieve at the account thereof. Whilst thou art

young thou wilt think it will never have an end: but behold, the longest day hath his evening, and that thou shalt enjoy it but once, that it never turns again; use it therefore as the spring-time, which soon departeth, and wherein thou oughtest to plant and sow all provisions for a long and happy life-Sir W. Raleigh—to his Son.

CCCXLVI.

We bring into the world with us a poor, needy, uncertain life, short at the longest, and unquiet at the best; all the imaginations of the witty and the wise have been perpetually busied to find out the ways how to revive it with pleasures, or relieve it with diversions; how to compose it with ease, and settle it with safety. To some of these ends have been employed the institutions of lawgivers, the reasonings of philosophers, the inventions of poets, the pains of labouring, and the extravagances of voluptuous men. All the world is perpetually

at work about nothing else, but only that our poor mortal lives should pass the easier and happier for that little time we possess them, or else end the better when we lose them.-Sir W. Temple.

CCCXLVII.

Such duty as the subject owes the prince,
Even such, a woman oweth to her husband:
And, when she's froward, peevish, sullen, sour,
And not obedient to his honest will,
What is she but a foul contending rebel,
And graceless traitor to her loving lord?-
I am ashamed, that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace;
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.
Why are our bodies soft, and weak and smooth,
Unapt to toil and trouble in the world;

But that our soft conditions and our hearts,
Should well agree with our external parts?
Come, come, you froward and unable worms!
My mind hath been as big as one of yours,
My heart as great; my reason, haply, more,
To bandy word for word, and frown for frown:
But now, I see our lances are but straws;

Our strength as weak our weakness past compare,—
That seeming to be most, which we least are.

Katherine, in Taming of the Shrew-Shakspeare.

CCXLVIII.

He that wants good sense is unhappy in having learning, for he has thereby only more ways of exposing himself; and he that has sense, knows that learning is not knowledge, but rather the art of using it.—Tatler.

CCCXLIX.

It is most true, that eyes are form'd to serve
The inward light; and that the heavenly part
Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve,
Rebels to Nature, strive for their own smart.

It is most true, what we call Cupid's dart,

An image is, which for ourselves we or "ye; And fools! adore in temple of our heart pt or

Till that, good God! make church and cly, nonen starve. True, that true beauty virtue is indeed,

Whereof this beauty can be but a shade

Which elements with mortal mixture breed:
True, that on earth, we are but pilgrims made,
And should in souì up to our country move;
True! and yet true that I must Stella love.

Astrophel and Stella-Sir P. Sidney.

CCCL.

The advice of our friends must be attended to with a judicious reserve; we must not give ourselves up to it, and blindly follow their determination, right or wrong. -Charron.

CCCLI.

Give me flattery,

Flattery the food of courts, that I may rock him,
And lull him in the down of his desires.

CCCLII.

Beaumont.

Were I to buy a hat, I would not have it from a stocking-maker, but a hatter; were I to buy shoes, I should not go to the tailor for that purpose. It is just so with regard to wit: did I, for my life desire to be well served, I would apply only to those who made it their trade, and lived by it. You smile at the oddity of my opinion; but be assured, my friend, that wit is in some measure mechanical; and that a man long habituated to catch at even its resemblance, will at last be happy enough to possess the substance; by a long habit of writing he acquires a justness of thinking, and a mastery of manner, which holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to equal.Goldsmith.

CCCLIII.

Poesy, thou sweet'st content,

That e'er heav'n to mortals lent:
Though they as a trifle leave thee,

Whose dull thoughts cannot conceive thee;

Though thou be to them a scorn,

That to naught but earth are born;

Let my life no longer be,

Than I am in love with thee!

Though our wise ones call it madness,
Let me never taste of gladness

If I love not thy madd'st fits

Above all their greatest wits!
And though some, too seeming holy,
Do account thy raptures folly,
Thou dost teach me to contemn

What makes knaves and fools of them!

CCCLIV.

George Wither.

There is I, think, no sort of talent so despisable, as