speculations; for never intending to go beyond speculation, it costs nothing to have it magnificent.-Burke.

MCXI.

Gold, though the most solid and heavy of metals, yet may be beaten out so thin, as to be lightest and slightest of all things. Thus nobility, though in itself most honourable, may be so attenuated through the smalnesse of means, as thereby to grow neglected; which makes our nobleman to practise Solomon's precept-"Be diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thine heards; for the crown doth not endure to every generation." If not the crown, much lesse the coronet; and good husbandry may as well stand with great honour, as breadth may consist with height.—Fuller.

MCXII.

A pretender to learning is one that would make all others more fools than himself, for though he know nothing, he would not have the world know so much. He conceits nothing in learning but the opinion, which he seeks to purchase without it, though he might with less labour cure his ignorance than hide it. He is indeed a kind of scholar-mountebank, and his art our delusion. He is tricked out in all the accoutrements of learning, and at the first encounter none passes better. He is oftener in his study than at his book, and you cannot pleasure him better than to deprehend him: yet he hears you not till the third knock, and then comes out very angry as interrupted. You find him in his slippers and a pen in his ear, in which formality he was asleep. His table is spread wide with some classic folio, which is as constant to it as the carpet, and hath laid open in the same page this half year. His candle is always a longer sitter up than himself, and the boast of his window at midnight. He walks much alone in the posture of meditation: and has a book still before his face in the fields. His pocket is seldom without a Greek testament or Hebrew bible, which he opens only in the church, and that when some stander-by looks over. He has sentences for

company, some scatterings of Seneca and Tacitus, which are good upon all occasions. If he reads any thing in the morning, it comes up all at dinner; and as long as that lasts, the discourse is his. He is a great plagiary of tavern wit, and comes to sermons only that he may talk of Austin. His parcels are the meer scrapings from company, yet he complains at parting what time he has lost. He is wondrously capricious to seem a judgment, and listens with a sower attention to what he understands not. He talks much of Scaliger, and Casaubon, and the Jesuits, and prefers some unheard of Dutch name before them all. He has verses to bring in upon these and these hints, and it shall go hard but he will wind in his opportunity. He is critical in a language he cannot conster, and speaks seldom under Arminius in divinity. His business and retirement and caller away is his study, and he protests no delight to it comparable. He is a great nomenclator of authors, which he has read in general in the catalogue, and in particular in the title, and goes seldom so far as the dedication. He never talks of any thing but learning, and learns all from talking. Three encounters with the same men pump him, and then he only puts in or gravely says nothing. He has taken pains to be an ass, though not to be a scholar, and is at length discovered and laughed at.—Bishop Earle.

MCXIII.

When you set about composing, it may be necessary for your ease, and better distillation of wit, to put on your worst clothes, and the worse the better; for an author, like a limb will yield the better for having a rag about him: besides that I have observed a gardener cut the outward rine of a tree, (which is the surtout of it,) to make it bear well: and this is a natural account of the usual poverty of poets, and is an argument, why wits, of all men living, ought to be ill clad. I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or philosopher; because the richest minerals are

ever found under the most ragged and withered surfaces of the earth.-Swift's Advice to a young Poet.

MCXIV.

Justice painted blind,

Infers his ministers are obliged to hear

The cause, and truth; the judge, determine of it;
And not sway'd or by favour or affection,
By a false gloss, or corrected comment, alter
The true intent and letter of the law.

Story-telling is not an art, but what we call a "knack;" it doth not so much subsist upon wit, as upon humour; and I will add that it is not perfect without proper gesticulations of the body, which naturally attend such merry emotions of the mind. I know very well that a certain gravity of countenance sets some stories off to advantage, where the hearer is to be surprised in the end; but this is by no means a general rule; for it is frequently convenient to aid and assist by cheerful looks and whimsical gesticulations. I will yet go further, and affirm that the success of a story very often depends. upon the make of the body, and the formation of the features of him who relates it.-Swift.

MCXVI.

When a man wants or comes short of an entire and accomplished virtue, our defects may be supplied by forgiveness, since the forgiving of evil deeds in others amounteth to no less than virtue in us; and therefore, it may be not unaptly called the paying our debts with another man's money.-Lord Herbert.

MCXVII.

Nothing is so pregnant as cruelty; so multifarious, so rapid, so ever-teeming a mother, is unknown to the animal kingdom; each of her experimens provokes another and refines upon the last: though always progressive, yet always remote from the end.-Lavater.

MCXVIII.

Too much or too little wit
Do only render th' owners fit
For nothing, but to be undone

Much easier than if they 'ad none.

MCXIX.

Butler.

The first minister of state has not so much business in public, as a wise man has in private: if the one have little leisure to be alone, the other has less leisure to be in company; the one has but part of the affairs of one nation, the other all the works of God and nature under his consideration.-Cowley.

MCXX.

It is no very uncommon thing in the world to meet with men of probity; there are likewise a great many men of honour to be found. Men of courage, men of sense, and men of letters, are frequent: but a true fine gentleman is what one seldom sees. He is properly a compound of the various good qualities that embellish mankind. As the great poet animates all the different parts of learning by the force of his genius, and irradiates all the compass of his knowledge by the lustre and brightness of his imagination; so all the great and solid perfections of life appear in the finished gentleman, with a beautiful gloss and varnish; every thing he says or does is accompanied with a manner, or rather a charm, that draws the admiration and good-will of every beholder.-Steele.

(Gold.)

MCXXI.

Here's musick

In this bag shall wake her, though she had drank opium, Or eaten mandrakes. Let commanders talk

Of cannons to make breaches; give but fire

To this petard, it shall blow open, madam,

The iron doors of a judge, and make you entrance;
When they (let them do what they can) with all
Their mines, their culierius, and basilicos,

Shall cool their feet without; this being the picklock
That dever fails.
Massinger.

MCXXII.

It is as usual to see a young serving man an old beggar, as to see a light horse first from the great saddle of a nobleman come to the hackney coach, and at last die in drawing a carre. But the good master is not like the cruell hunter in the fable, who beat his old dogge, because his toothlesse mouth let go the game: he rather imitates the noble nature of our Prince Henry, who took order for the keeping of an old English mastiffe, which had made a lion run away.-Fuller.

MCXXIII.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Shakspeare-to Mr. W. H.

MCXXIV.

As nothing is more natural than for every one to desire to be happy, it is not to be wondered at that the wisest men in all ages have spent so much time to discover what happiness is, and wherein it chiefly consists. An eminent writer, named Varro, reckons up no less than two hundred and eighty-eight different opinions upon this subject; and another, called Lucian, after having given us a long catalogue of the notions of several philosophers, endeavours to show the absurdity of all of them, without establishing any thing of his own.-Budgell.