[48] Strong as this reprobation is, it is as much needed to-day as when written; the whole English race (if we credit Westminster Review, March, 1869), especially the upper class, is suffering from the awful effects of vice.
[49] Thus Englished by the famous Tom Brown:
“I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, the reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know and know full well, I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.”
[50] The Maréchal de Richelieu.
[51] This single word implies decorum, good breeding, and propriety.
[52] As to terminations, so careful were the best French poets of their rhymes.
[53] Chesterfield had at once perceived the emptiness of the saying, which is certainly not in ipsissimis verbis of Lord Shaftesbury. “We have,” says Carlyle, in his “Essay on Voltaire,” “oftener than once endeavored to attach some meaning to that aphorism, vulgarly imputed to Shaftesbury—which, however, we can find nowhere in his works,—that ridicule is the test of truth.” In the “Characteristics of Enthusiasm,” sec. 2, there is this sentence, which comes very near it:—“How is it, etc., that we (Christians) appear such cowards in reasoning, and are so afraid to stand the test of ridicule”; but further on (p. 11, ed. 1733, vol. i.) he asks: “For what ridicule can lie against reason? or how can any one of the least justice of thought admire a ridicule wrong placed? Nothing is more ridiculous than this itself.” Shaftesbury often returns to this subject; see “Errors in Wit,” etc.
[54] Ariosto, Tasso, and Boccaccio: the Orlando, Gierusalemme, and Decamerone.
[55] See “Maxims,” p. 328.
[56] These maxims are referred to on page 324.