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with wonderful sagacity, would expose him to be assassinated by pretended ignorance, and would be charged upon himself: and if he could avoid their guards and get beyond them undiscovered, whither should he go? and what place would receive and defend him? The hope of the city seemed not to him to have a foundation of reason; they had been too late subdued to recover courage for such an adventure; and the army now was much more master of it than when they desponded. There is reason to believe that he did resolve to transport himself beyond the seas, which had been no hard matter to have brought to pass; but with whom he consulted for the way of doing it is not to this day discovered; they who were instrumental in his remove pretending to know nothing of the resolution, or counsel. But one morning, the king having the night before pretended some indisposition, and that he would go to his rest, they who went into his chamber found that he was not there, nor had been in his bed that night. There were two or three letters found upon his table, writ all with his own hand, one to the parliament, another to the general; in which he declared the reason of his remove to be, an apprehension that some desperate persons had a design to assassinate him; and therefore he had withdrawn himself with a purpose of remaining concealed, until the parliament had agreed upon such propositions as should be fit for him to consent to; and he would then appear and willingly consent to anything that should be for the peace and happiness of the kingdom.

LORD CLARENDON

441.

WHAT CONSTITUTES INTEMPERATENESS. Men are held intemperate, only when their desires overcome or prevent the action of their reason; and they are indeed intemperate in the exact degree in which such prevention or interference takes place, and therefore in many instances and acts which do not lower the world's estimation of their temperance. For so long as it can be supposed that the reason has acted imperfectly owing to its own imperfection, or to the imperfection of the promises submitted to it, as when men give an inordinate preference to their own pursuits, because they cannot, in the nature of things, have sufficiently experienced the goodness and benefit of others; and so long as it may be presumed that men have referred to reason in what they do, and have not suffered its orders to be

disobeyed through mere impulse and desire, though those orders may be full of error owing to the reason's own feebleness; so long men are not held intemperate.

J. RUSKIN

442. SPIRIT OF THE ENGLISH CONSTITUTION. Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? It is the love of the people, it is their attachment to their government from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience, without which your army would be a base rabble, and your navy nothing but rotten timber. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom: and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America, with the old warning of the Church, Sursum corda! We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire: and have made the most extensive, and the only honourable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the health, the number, the happiness of the human race.

E. BURKE

443. THE REALITY OF WHAT IS TRULY BEFORE US GIVES REALITY TO ALL THE ASSOCIATE IMAGES THAT BLEND AND HARMONIZE WITH IT. We think of ancient Greece-we tread on the soil of Athens or Sparta. Our emotion, which was before faint, is now one of the liveliest of which our soul is susceptible, because it is fixed and realized in the existing and present object. The same images arise to us, but they coexist now as they rise with all the monuments which we behold, with the land itself, with the sound of those waves, which are dashing now, as they dashed so many ages before, when their murmur was heard by the hero of whom we think -all now lives before us. The visions of other years exist again to our very eye: we see embodied all which we feel in our mind.

FOL. CENT.

18

444. PERVADING INFLUENCE OF AMBITION. If we look abroad upon the great multitude of mankind, and endeavour to trace out the principles of action in every individual, it will, I think, seem highly probable that ambition runs through the whole species, and that every man in proportion to the vigour of his complexion is more or less actuated by it. It is indeed no uncommon thing to meet with men, who, by the natural bent of their inclinations, and without the discipline of philosophy, aspire not to the heights of power and grandeur; who never set their hearts upon a numerous train of clients and dependencies, nor other gay appendages of greatness; who are contented with a competency, and will not molest their tranquillity to gain an abundance. But it is not therefore to be concluded that such a man is not ambitious; his desires may have cut out another channel, and determined him to other pursuits; the motive however may be still the same; and in these cases likewise the man may be equally pushed on with the desire of distinction. Though the pure consciousness of worthy actions, abstracted from the views of popular applause, be to a generous mind an ample reward, yet the desire of distinction was doubtless implanted in our natures as an additional incentive to exert ourselves in virtuous excellence. This passion indeed, like all others, is frequently perverted to evil and ignoble purposes; so that we may account for many of the excellencies and follies of life upon the same innate principle, to wit, the desire of being remarkable: for this, as it has been differently cultivated by education, study and converse, will bring forth suitable effects as it falls in with an ingenuous disposition, or a corrupt mind. It does accordingly express itself in acts of magnanimity or selfish cunning, as it meets with a good or a weak understanding. As it has been employed in embellishing the mind, or adorning the outside, it renders the man eminently praiseworthy or ridiculous. Ambition therefore is not to be confined only to one passion or pursuit; for as the same humours in constitutions otherwise different affect the body after different manners, so the same aspiring principle within us, sometimes breaks forth upon one object, sometimes upon another.

T. HUGHES

445. THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE-ITS GRADUAL IMPROVEMENT. Language proceeds, like every thing else, through

improvement to degeneracy. The fate of the English tongue has been similar to that of others. We know nothing of the scanty jargon of our barbarous ancestors; but we have specimens of our language, when it began to be adapted to civil and religious purposes, and find it such as might naturally be expected, artless and simple, unconnected and concise. The writers seem to have desired little more than to be understood, and seldom, perhaps, aspired to the praise of pleasing; their verses were considered chiefly as memorial, and, therefore, did not differ from prose, but by the measure or the rhyme. In this state, varied a little according to the different purposes or abilities of writers, our language may be said to have continued to the time of Gower, whom Chaucer calls his master, and who, however obscured by his scholar's popularity, seems justly to claim an honour, which has been hitherto denied him, of showing his countrymen that something more was to be desired, and that English verse might be exalted into poetry. From the time of Gower and Chaucer, the English writers have studied elegance and advanced their language by successive improvements to as much harmony as it can easily receive, and as much copiousness as human knowledge has hitherto required. These advances have not been made at all times with the same diligence or the same success. Negligence has suspended the course of improvement, or affectation turned it aside; time has elapsed with little change, or change has been made without amendment. But elegance has been long kept in view, with attention as near to constancy, as life permits; till every man now endeavours to excel others in accuracy, or outshine them in splendour of style; and the danger is, lest care should too soon pass too affectation.

S. JOHNSON

446. THE RETREAT FROM MOSCOW. In the retreat from Moscow Buonaparte provided only for his own security: the famished and the wounded were without protection. Those, to the amount of forty thousand, who supplied the army with occasional food by distant and desperate excursions, were uninformed of its retreat: they perished to a man, and caused to perish by their disappearance a far greater number of their former comrades. Forty miles of road were excavated in the snow. The army seemed a phantasmagoria; no sound of horses' feet was heard, no wheel of waggon or

artillery, no voice of man. Regiment followed regiment in long and broken lines, between two files of soldiers the whole way. Some stood erect, some reclined a little, some laid their arms beside them, some clasped them; all were dead. Several of these had slept in that position, but the greater part had been placed so, to leave the more room: and not a few from every troop and detachment took their voluntary station amongst them. The barbarians, who at other seasons rush into battle with loud cries, rarely did so. Skins covered not their bodies only but their faces, and, such was the intensity of cold, they reluctantly gave vent, from amidst the spoils they had taken, to this first and most natural expression of their vengeance. Their spears, although often of soft wood, as the beech, the birch, the pine, remained unbroken, while the sword and the sabre of the adversary cracked like ice. Feeble from inanition, inert from weariness, and somnolent from the iciness that enthralled them, they sank into forgetfulness with the Cossacks in pursuit and coming down upon them, and even while they could yet discern, for they looked more frequently to that quarter, the more fortunate of their comrades marching home. The gay and lively Frenchman, to whom war had been sport and pastime, was now reduced to such apathy, that, in the midst of some kind speech which a friend was to communicate to those he loved the most tenderly, he paused from rigid drowsiness, and bade the messenger adieu. Some, it is reported (and what is unnatural, is, in such extremity, not incredible) closed their eyes and threw down their muskets, while they could use them still, not from hope nor from fear, but part from indignation at their general, whose retreats had always been followed by the total ruin of his army; and part, remembering with what brave nations they had once fought gloriously, from the impossibility of defeating or resisting so barbarous and obscure an enemy.

447. SCENE IN RASSELAS. 'The things that are now before us,' said the princess, 'require attention and deserve it. What have I to do with the heroes or the monuments of ancient times? with times which never can return, and heroes, whose form of life was different from all that the present condition of mankind requires or allows?'

'To know anything,' returned the poet, 'we must know its effects; to see men, we must see their works, that

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