MODESTY. FROM AN INDIAN MANUSCRIPT WRITTEN BY AN ANCIENT BRAHMIN. HO art thou, O man, that presumest on thine own wisdom? or why dost thou vaunt thyself on thine own acquirements? The first step toward being wise is to know that thou art ignorant; and if thou wouldst not be esteemed foolish in the judgment of others, cast off the folly of being wise in thine own conceit. As a plain garment best adorneth a beautiful woman, so a decent behavior is the greatest ornament of wisdom. The speech of a modest man giveth lustre to truth, and the diffidence of his words absolveth his error. He relieth not on his own wisdom; he weigheth the counsels of a friend and receiveth the benefit thereof. He turneth away his ear from his own praise and believeth it not; he is the last in discovering his own perfections. Yet, as a veil addeth to beauty, so are his virtues set off by the shade which his modesty casteth upon them. But behold the vain man and observe the arrogant! He clotheth himself in rich attire; he walketh in the public street; he casteth round his eyes and courteth obser vation. He tosseth up his head and overlooketh the poor; he treateth his inferiors with in solence, and his superiors, in return, look down on his pride and folly with laughter. He despiseth the judgment of others; he relieth on his own opinion, and is confounded. He is puffed up with the vanity of his imagination; his delight is to hear, and to speak, of himself all the day long. He swalloweth with greediness his own praise, and the flatterer, in return, eateth him up. Translation of ROBERT DODSLEY. USES OF KNOWLEDGE. LEARNING EARNING taketh away the wildness and barbarism and fierceness of men's minds, though a little superficial learning doth rather work a contrary effect. It taketh away all levity, temerity and insolency by copious suggestion of all doubts and difficulties, and acquainting the mind to balance reasons on both sides, and to turn back the first offers and conceits of the kind, and to accept of nothing but the examined and tried. It taketh away vain admiration of anything which is the root of all weakness, for all things are admired either because they are new or because they are great. For novelty no man wadeth in learning or contemplation thoroughly, but will find printed in his heart, "I know nothing." Neither can any man marvel at the play of puppets that goeth behind the curtain and adviseth well of the motion. And for magnitude, as Alexander the Great, after that he was used to great armies and the great conquests of the spacious provinces in Asia, when he received letters out of Greece of some fights and services there which were commonly for a passage or a fort, or some walled town at the most, he said, "It seemed to him that he was advertised of the battle of the frogs and the mice, that the old tales went off." So, certainly, if a man meditate upon the universal frame of nature, the earth with men upon it, the divineness of souls excepted, will not seem much other than an ant-hill, where some ants carry corn, and some carry their young, and some go empty, and all to and fro a little heap of dust. It taketh away or mitigateth fear of death or adverse fortune, which is one of the greatest impediments of virtue and imperfections of manners. For if a man's mind be deeply seasoned with the consideration of the mortality and corruptible nature of things, he will easily concur with Epictetus, who went forth one day and saw a woman weeping for ing the wounds and the ulcerations thereof and the life; and therefore I will conclude with the chief reason of all, which is that it disposeth the constitution of the mind not to be fixed or settled in the defects thereof, but still to be capable and susceptible of reformation. For the unlearned man knows not what it is to descend into himself or to call himself to account, nor the pleasure of that most pleasant life which consists in our daily feeling ourselves to become better. The good parts he hath he will learn to show to the full and use them dextrously, but not much to increase them; the faults he hath he will learn how to hide and color them, but not much to amend them, like an illmower that mows on still and never whets his scythe. Whereas, with the learned man it fares otherwise, that he doth ever intermix the correction and amendment of his mind. with the use and employment thereof. her pitcher of earth that was broken, and L went forth the next day and saw a woman weeping for her son that was dead, and thereupon said, "Yesterday I saw a fragile thing broken; to-day I have seen a mortal thing die." And therefore Virgil did excellently and profoundly couple the knowledge of causes and the conquest of all fears together. It were too long to go over particular remedies which learning doth minister to all the diseases of the mind, sometimes purging the ill-humors, sometimes opening the obstructions, sometimes helping the digestion, sometimes increasing the appetite, sometimes heal LIFE. FRANCIS BACON. IFE, I know not what thou art, Life, we've been long together, er: 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear: Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear. Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not "Good-night," but in some brighter clime Bid me "Good-morning." ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD. THE EARLY INHABITANTS OF MEXICO. FROM FRIEDRICH HEINRICH ALEXANDER, BARON VON HUMBOLDT. ROM the seventh to the thir- primitive country, or whether they came originally from Asia or the northwest coast of America and traversed the savannas of Nabajoa and Moqui to arrive at the Rio Gila. The hieroglyphical tables of the Aztecs have transmitted to us the memory of the principal epochs of the great migrations among the Americans. This migration bears some analogy to that which in the fifth century plunged Europe in a state of barbarism of which we yet feel the fatal effects in many of our social institutions. However, the people who traversed Mexico left behind them traces of cultivation and civilization. The Toultecs appeared first, in the year 648, the Chichimecks in 1170, the Nahualtecs in 1178, the Acolhues and Aztecs in 1196. The Toultecs introduced the cultivation of maize and cotton; they built cities, made roads and constructed those great pyramids which are yet admired, and of which the faces are very accurately laid out. They knew the use of hieroglyphical paintings; they could found metals and cut the hardest stones, and they had a solar year more perfect than that of the Greeks and Romans. The form of their government indicated that they were the descendants of a people who had experienced great vicissitudes in their social state. But where is the source of that cultivation ? Where is the country from which the Toultecs and Mexicans issued? Tradition and historical hieroglyphics name Huehuetlapallan, Tollan and Aztlan as the first residence of these wandering nations. There are no remains of any ancient civilization of the human species to the north of the Rio Gila or in the northern regions. travelled through by Hearne, Fiedler and Mackenzie, but on the north-west coast, between Nootka and Cook River, especially under the fifty-seventh degree of north latitude, in Norfolk Bay and Cox Canal, the natives display a decided taste for hieroglyphical paintings. M. Fleurieu, a man of distinguished learning, supposes that these people might be the descendants of some Mexican colony which at the period of the conquest took refuge in those northern regions. This ingenious opinion will appear less probable if we consider the great distance which these colonists would have to travel, and reflect that the Mexican cultivation did not extend beyond the twentieth degree of latitude. I am rather inclined to believe that on the migration of the Toultecs and Aztecs to the south some tribes remained | desolated, under the name of Huns, the on the coasts of New Norfolk and New Cornwall, while the rest continued their course southward. We can conceive how people travelling en masse-for example, the Ostrogoths and Alani-were able to pass from the Black Sea into Spain; but how could we believe that a portion of these people were able to return from west to east at an epoch when other hordes had already occupied their first abodes on the banks of the Don or the Boristhenes? This is not the place to discuss the great problem of the Asiatic origin of the Toultecs or Aztecs. The general question of the first origin of the inhabitants of the continent is beyond the limits prescribed to history, and is not, perhaps, even a philosophical question. There undoubtedly existed other people in Mexico at the time when the Toultecs arrived there in the course of their migration, and therefore to assert that the Toultecs are an Asiatic race is not maintaining that all the Americans came originally from Thibet or Oriental Siberia. De Guignes attempted to prove by the Chinese annals that they visited America posterior to 458, and Horn in his ingenious work De Originibus Americanis, published in 1699, M. Scherer in his historical researches respecting the New World, and more recent writers, have made it appear extremely probable that old relations existed between Asia and America. I have advanced that the Toultecs, or Aztecs, might be a part of those Hiongnoux who, according to the Chinese historians, emigrated under their leader Punon and were lost in the north parts of Siberia. This nation of warrior-shepherds has more than once changed the face of Oriental Asia and finest parts of civilized Europe. All these conjectures will acquire more probability when a marked analogy shall be discovered between the languages of Tartary and those of the new continent an analogy which, according to the latest researches of Mr. Barton Smith, extends only to a very smal! number of words. The want of wheat, oats. barley, rye, and all those nutritive gramina which go under the general name of "cereal," seems to prove that if Asiatic tribes passed into America they must have descended from pastoral people. We see in the old continent that the cultivation of cereal gramina and the use of milk were introduced as far back as we have any historical records. The inhabitants of the new continent cultivated no other gramina than maize (zea). They fed on no species of milk, though the lamas, alpacas, and in the North of Mexico and Canada two kinds of indigenous oxen, would have afforded them milk in abundance. These are striking contrasts between the Mongol and American race. Without losing ourselves in suppositions as to the first country of the Toultecs and the Aztecs, and without attempting to fix the geographical position of those ancient kingdoms of Huehuetlapallan and Aztlan, we shall confine ourselves to the accounts of the Spanish historians. The northern provinces New Biscay, Sonora and New Mexico, were very thinly inhabited in the sixteenth century. The natives were hunters and shepherds, and they withdrew as the European conquerors advanced toward the north. Agriculture alone attaches man to the soil and develops the love of country. Thus we see that in the southern parts of Anahuac, in the cul tivated region adjacent to Tenochtitlan, the Aztec colonists patiently endured the cruel vexations exercised toward them by their conquerors, and suffered everything rather than quit the soil which their fathers had cultivated. But in the northern provinces the natives yielded to the conquerors their uncultivated savannas, which served for pasturage to the buffaloes. The Indians took refuge beyond the Rio Gila, toward the Rio Zaguanas and the mountains De las Grullas. The Indian tribes who formerly occupied the territory of the United States and Canada followed the same policy, and chose rather to withdraw first behind the Alleghany Mountains, then behind the Ohio, and then behind the Missouri, to avoid being forced to live among the Europeans. From the same cause we find the copper-colored race neither in the provincias internas of New Spain nor in the cultivated parts of the United States. The migrations of the American tribes having been constantly carried on from north to south, at least between the sixth and twelfth centuries, it is certain that the Indian population of New Spain must be composed In of very heterogeneous elements. In proportion as the population flowed toward the south, some tribes would stop in their progress and mingle with the tribes which followed them. The great variety of languages still spoken in the kingdom of Mexico proves a great variety of races and origin. Translation of JOHN BLACK. of temper, though these may give them great comfort within and administer to an honest pride in their own minds, will by no means, alas! do their business in the world. Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are, indeed, as it were, a guard to Virtue without which she can never be safe. It is not enough that your designs-nay, that your actions-are intrinsically good: you must take care they shall appear so. If your inside be never so beautiful, you must preserve a fair outside also. This must be constantly looked to, or malice and envy will take care to blacken it so that sagacity and goodness will not be able to see through it and to discern the beauties within. Let this be your constant maxim-that no man can be good enough to enable him to neglect the rules of prudence; nor will Virtue herself look beautiful unless she be bedecked with the outward ornaments of decency and decorum. HENRY FIELDING. LONG HAVE I LOVED. LONG have I loved what I behold— The night that calms, the day that The common growth of Mother Earth Her humblest mirth and tears. The dragon's wing, the magic ring, I shall not covet for my dower PRUDENCE NECESSARY TO THE BEST If I along that lowly way WE OF MEN. ELL-DISPOSED youths may find that goodness of heart and openness With sympathetic heart may stray, And with a soul of power. BERNARD BARTON. |