ible justice of this court. Your lordships fined him forty thousand pounds, notwithstanding all his merits; notwithstanding his humility; notwithstanding his contrition; notwithstanding the decorum of his behaviour, so well suited to a man under the prosecution of the commons of England, before the peers of England. You fined him in a sum fully equal to one hundred thousand pounds of the present day. You imprisoned him during the king's pleasure; and you disqualified him for ever from having a seat in this House, and any office in this kingdom. This is the way in which the commons behaved formerly, and in which your lordships acted formerly; when no culprit at this bar dared to hurl a recriminatory accusation against his prosecutors, or dared to censure the language in which they expressed their indignation at his crimes. E. BURKE 302. EFFECTS OF USURIOUS TRANSACTIONS IN THE CAR NATICK. In consequence of this double game, all the territorial revenues have, at one time or other, been covered by those locusts, the English soucars. Not one single foot of the Carnatick has escaped them, a territory as large as England. During these operations what a scene has that country presented! The usurious European assignee supersedes the nabob's native farmer of the revenue; the farmer flies to the nabob's presence to claim his bargain; whilst his servants murmur for wages, and his soldiers mutiny for pay. The mortgage to the European assignee is then resumed, and the native farmer replaced; replaced, again to be removed on the new clamour of the European assignee. Every man of rank and landed fortune being long since extinguished, the remaining miserable last cultivator, who grows to the soil, after having his back scored by the farmer, has it again flayed by the whip of the assignee, and is thus by a ravenous, because a short-lived, succession of claimants, lashed from oppressor to oppressor, whilst a single drop of blood is left as the means of extorting a single grain of corn. Do not think I paint. Far, very far from it: I do not reach the fact, nor approach to it. Men of respectable condition, men equal to your substantial English yeomen, are daily tied up and scourged to answer the multiplied demands of various contending and contradictory titles, all issuing from one and the same source. E. BURKE 303. PRUDENCE' CANNOT ALWAYS COMMAND SUCCESS. Though prudence does undoubtedly in a great measure produce our good or ill fortune in the world, it is certain there are many unforeseen accidents and occurrences, which very often pervert the finest schemes that can be laid by human wisdom. The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. Nothing less than infinite wisdom can have an absolute command over fortune; the highest degree of it, which man can possess, is by no means equal to fortuitous events, and to such contingencies as may rise in the prosecution of our affairs. Nay, it very often happens, that prudence, which has always in it a great mixture of caution, hinders a man from being so fortunate as he might possibly have been without it. A person who only aims at what is likely to succeed, and follows closely the dictates of human prudence, never meets with those great and unforeseen successes, which are often the effect of a sanguine temper, or a more happy rashness. J. ADDISON 304. They were both men of great parts and industry, though they loved pleasures too; both proud and ambitious; the former, much the civiller and better bred, of the better nature and better judgment, and an openness and clearness more to be trusted and relied upon than most men of that nation: the latter, insolent, imperious, flattering, and dissembling, fitter for intrigues and contrivances by the want of the ingenuity which the other had, and by the experience and practice he had in the committee of both kingdoms in their darkest designs. The former was a man of honour and courage; the latter had courage enough not to fail where it was absolutely necessary, and no impediment of honour to restrain him from doing any thing that might gratify any of his passions. THE EARLS OF LANRICK AND LAUTHERDALE. LORD CLARENDON 305. JUSTICE IS SLOW-INJURY QUICK AND RAPID. From the first records of human impatience, down to the present time, it has been complained that the march of violence and oppression is rapid; but that the progress of remedial and vindictive justice, even the divine, has almost always favoured the appearance of being languid and slug gish. Something of this is owing to the very nature and constitution of human affairs; because, as justice is a circumspect, cautious, scrutinizing, balancing principle, full of doubt even of itself, and fearful- of doing wrong even to the greatest wrong-doers, in the nature of things its movements must be slow, in comparison with the headlong rapidity with which avarice, ambition, and revenge, pounce down upon the devoted prey of those violent and destructive passions. And indeed the disproportion between crime and justice, when seen in the particular acts of either, would be so much to the advantage of crimes and criminals, that we should find it difficult to defend laws and tribunals if we did not look, not to the immediate, not to the retrospective, but the provident operation of justice. E. BURKE 306. PLATO, HIS ILLUSTRATIONS OF MORAL INSTRUCTION. Plato enforced these lessons by an inexhaustible variety of just and beautiful illustrations, sometimes striking from their familiarity, sometimes subduing by their grandeur; and his works are the store-house from which moralists have from age to age borrowed the means of rendering moral instruction easier and more delightful. Virtue he represented as the harmony of the whole soul;-as a peace between all its principles and desires, assigning to each as much space as they can occupy without encroaching on each other; - as a state of perfect health, in which every function was performed with ease, pleasure, and vigour;-as a wellordered commonwealth, where the obedient passions executed with energy the laws and commands of reason. The vicious mind presented the odious character, sometimes of discord, of war;-sometimes of disease;—always of passions warring with each other in eternal anarchy. Consistent with himself, and at peace with his fellows, the good man felt in the quiet of his conscience a foretaste of the approbation of God. 'Oh what ardent love would virtue inspire if she could be seen!' 'If the heart of a tyrant could be laid bare, we should see how it was cut and torn by its own evil passions and by an avenging conscience.' SIR J. MACKINTOSH 307. AUGUSTUS CÆSAR-CHARACTER OF HIS SOVEREIGNTY. Cæsar had trusted too magnanimously to the people as the basis of his sovereignty. However much they rejoiced in his supremacy, in which their own seemed to be reflected, the unarmed multitude were incapable of protecting it. Their hero discarded the defence of the legions, and a few months witnessed his assassination. Augustus learned circumspection from the failure of his predecessor's enterprize. He organized a military establishment of which he made himself the permanent head: to him every legionary swore personal fidelity; every officer depended upon his direct appointment. He enlisted under his banners the most vigorous and restless spirits of the aristocracy; he subdued their energies to his will by the restraints of discipline, the allurements of honour, and the ideas of military devotion. By engrossing the command of the national forces he disarmed all competitors for power. But this was not enough to secure his position. To thwart the secret machinations of the disaffected it was requisite to content the people, and to employ the nobility. The elaborate system of civil administration devised or perfected by his astuteness preserved the show of republican government, while it amused the nobles with a shadow of authority. The last century of the commonwealth had witnessed the rule of an oligarchy under the forms of a democracy: the imperial constitution was the government of an autocrat under the forms of an aristocracy. The names of the ancient free-state threw a transparent veil over an actual despotism. The commander of the legions was really the master of the citizens, and the theory of a balance of effective powers was in fact merely illusory. C. MERIVALE 308. A MERCENARY WAR DIFFICULT TO BE SUSTAINED. A danger to avert a danger,—a present inconvenience and suffering to prevent a foreseen future, and a worse calamity -these are the motives that belong to an animal, who in his constitution is at once adventurous and provident; circumspect and daring; whom his Creator has made, as the poet says, "of large discourse, looking before and after." But never can a vehement and sustained spirit of fortitude be kindled in a people by a war of calculation. It has nothing that can keep the mind erect under the gusts of adversity. Even where men are willing, as sometimes they are, to barter their blood for lucre, to hazard their safety for the gratification of their avarice, the passion which animates them to that sort of conflict, like all the short-sighted passions, must see its objects distinct and near at hand. The passions of the lower orders are hungry and impatient. Speculative plunder; contingent spoil; future, long-adjourned, uncertain booty; pillage which must enrich a late posterity and which possibly may not reach to posterity at all; these, for any length of time, will never support a mercenary war. The people are in the right. The blood of man should never be shed, but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity: the rest is crime. E. BURKE 309. KNOWLEDGE INCREASES POWER. From moral virtue let us pass on to matter of power and commandment, and consider whether in right reason there be any comparable with that wherewith knowledge investeth and crowneth man's nature. We see the dignity of the commandment is according to the dignity of the commanded: to have commandment over beasts, as herdsmen have, is a thing contemptible; to have commandment over children, as schoolmasters have, is a matter of small honour; to have commandment over galley-slaves is a disparagement rather than an honour. Neither is the commandment of tyrants much better, over people which have put off the generosity of their minds: and therefore it was ever holden that honours in free monarchies and commonwealths had a sweetness more than in tyrannies; because the commandment extendeth more over the wills of men, and not only over their deeds and services. And therefore, when Virgil putteth himself forth to attribute to Augustus Cæsar the best of human honours, he doth it in these words: victorque volentes per populos dat jura, viamque affectat Olympo. LORD BACON 310. A WALK UPON THE SEA-SHORE. It was vacationtime, and that gave me a loose from my business at the bar; for it was the season after the summer's heat, when Autumn promised fair and put on the face of temperate. We set out, therefore, in the morning early, and as we were walking upon the sea-shore, and a kindly breeze fanned and refreshed our limbs, and the yielding sand softly submitted to our feet |