* * * * *
DISAGREEABLE PEOPLE.--Some persons are of so teazing and fidgetty a turn
of mind, that they do not give you a moment’s rest. Everything goes
wrong with them. They complain of a headache or the weather. They take
up a book, and lay it down again--venture an opinion, and retract it
before they have half done--offer to serve you, and prevent some one else
from doing it. If you dine with them at a tavern, in order to be more
at your ease, the fish is too little done--the sauce is not the right
one; they ask for a sort of wine which they think is not to be had, or
if it is, after some trouble, procured, do not touch it; they give the
waiter fifty contradictory orders, and are restless and sit on thorns
the whole of dinner time. All this is owing to a want of robust health,
and of a strong spirit of enjoyment; it is a fastidious habit of mind,
produced by a valetudinary habit of body: they are out of sorts with
everything, and of course their ill-humour and captiousness communicates
itself to you, who are as little delighted with them as they are with
other things. Another sort of people, equally objectionable with this
helpless class, who are disconcerted by a shower of heaven’s rain, or
stopped by an insect’s wing, are those who, in the opposite spirit, will
have every thing their own way, and carry all before them--who cannot
brook the slightest shadow of opposition--who are always in the heat of
an argument, unless where they disdain your understanding so much as not
to condescend to argue with you--who knit their brows and roll their eyes
and clench their teeth in some speculative discussion, as if they were
engaged in a personal quarrel--and who, though successful over almost
every competitor, seem still to resent the very offer of resistance to
their supposed authority, and are as angry as if they had sustained some
premeditated injury. There is an impatience of temper and an intolerance
of opinion in this that conciliates neither our affection nor esteem.
To such persons nothing appears of any moment but the indulgence of a
domineering intellectual superiority, to the disregard and discomfiture
of their own and everybody else’s comfort. Mounted on an abstract
proposition, they trample on every courtesy and decency of behaviour;
and though, perhaps, they do not intend the gross personalities they are
guilty of, yet they cannot be acquitted of a want of due consideration
for others, and of an intolerable egotism in the support of truth and
justice. You may hear one of these impetuous declaimers pleading the
cause of humanity in a voice of thunder, or expatiating on the beauty of
a Guido, with features distorted with rage and scorn. This is not a very
amiable or edifying spectacle.--_Hazlitt’s Table-Talk._
* * * * *
NECESSITY OF A THOROUGH EDUCATION.--Good education being a preparation
for social life, necessarily embraces the whole man--body, head, and
heart--for in social life the whole man is necessarily called into
exertion in one way or another almost every hour. But this is not
sufficient. There must be no preponderance, as well as no exclusion; a
limited or biassed education produces monsters. Some are satisfied with
the cultivation of a single faculty--some with the partial cultivation
of each. A child is trained up to working; he is hammered into a hardy
laborer--a stout material for the physical bone and muscle of the
state. This is good, so far as it goes; but it is bad, because it goes
no farther. He is not taught reading; he is not taught religion; above
all, he is not taught thinking. He never looks into his other self; he
soon forgets its existence; the man becomes all body; his intellectual
and moral being lies fallow. The growth of such a system will be a
sturdy race of machines--delvers and soldiers, but not men: so much
brute physical energy swinging loosely through society at the discretion
of those more spiritual natures to whom their education, neglected or
perverted in another way, gives wickedness with power, and teaches the
secrets of mind only as instruments to crush or bend men for their own
selfish purposes. Others educate the intellectual and moral being only;
the physical, once the building is raised, like an idle scaffolding,
is cast by. But the omission is injurious--often fatal: malady is laid
up, in all its thousand forms, in the infant and the child. It spreads
out upon the man. When his spirit is in the flush of its strength, and
his moral rivals his intellectual nature in compass and power, then it
is that the despised portion of his being rises up and avenges itself
for this contempt. The studious man feels, as he walks down life, a
thousand minute retaliations for the prodigal waste of his youthful
vigour. The body bows down beneath the burden of the mind; it wears
gradually away into weakness and incompetency; clouds of sickness,
pangs of pain, obscure, distort, weigh it to the earth. Health is not
a thing of organization only, but of training; it is to be laid up bit
by bit. We are to be _made_ healthy--tutored and practised into health.
Omit health in favour of the intellectual and moral faculties, and
you provide instruments, it is true, for mind, but instruments which,
when wanted, cannot be used. Intellectual and moral education may rank
before physical, but they are not more essential; the physical powers
are the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for the spiritual. The
base of the column is in the earth; but, without it, neither could the
shaft stand firm above it, nor the capital ascend to the sky.--_Wyse on
Education._
* * * * *
HOME.--The great end of prudence is to give cheerfulness to those hours
which splendour cannot gild, and acclamation cannot exhilarate. Those
soft intervals of unbended amusement, in which a man shrinks to his
natural dimensions, and throws aside the ornaments or disguises which
he feels in privacy to be useless incumbrances, and to lose all effect
when they become familiar. To be happy at home is the ultimate result
of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends,
and of which every desire prompts the prosecution. It is indeed at home
that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate of
his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional,
and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honour and fictitious
benevolence.--_Johnson._
* * * * *
If it were enacted that only persons of high rank should dine upon three
dishes, the lower sort would desire to have three; but if commoners were
permitted to have as many dishes as they pleased, whilst the nobility
were limited to two, the inferior sort would not exceed that number. An
order to abolish the wearing of jewels has set a whole country in an
uproar; but if the order had only prohibited earrings to ladies of the
first quality, other women would not have desired to wear them.--_The
Reflector._
* * * * *
The very consciousness of being beloved by the object of our attachment,
will disarm of its terrors even death itself.--_D’Israeli._
* * * * *
The petty sovereign of an insignificant tribe of North America every
morning stalks out of his hovel, bids the sun good morrow, and points out
to him with his finger the course he is to take for the day.
* * * * *
Love labour; if you do not want it for food, you may for physic.
* * * * *
Industry often prevents what lazy folly thinks inevitable. Industry
argues an ingenuous, great, and generous disposition of soul, by
unweariedly pursuing things in the fairest light, and disdains to enjoy
the fruit of other men’s labours without deserving it.
* * * * *
He who lies under the dominion of any one vice must expect the common
effects of it. If lazy, to be poor; if intemperate, to be diseased; if
luxurious, to die betimes, &c.
* * * * *
With discretion the vicious preserve their honour, and without it the
virtuous lose it.
* * * * *