Ægypt
, says the Historian, would be over-run with Crocodiles: for the
Ægyptians
are so far from destroying those pernicious Creatures, that they worship them as Gods.
If we look into the Behaviour of ordinary Partizans, we shall find them far from resembling this disinterested Animal; and rather acting after the Example of the wild
Tartars
, who are ambitious of destroying a Man of the most extraordinary Parts and Accomplishments, as thinking that upon his Decease the same Talents, whatever Post they qualified him for, enter of course into his Destroyer.
As in the whole Train of my Speculations, I have endeavoured as much as I am able to extinguish that pernicious Spirit of Passion and Prejudice, which rages with the same Violence in all Parties, I am still the more desirous of doing some Good in this Particular, because I observe that the Spirit of Party reigns more in the Country than in the Town. It here contracts a kind of Brutality and rustick Fierceness, to which Men of a politer Conversation are wholly Strangers. It extends it self even to the Return of the Bow and the Hat; and at the same time that the Heads of Parties preserve toward one another an outward Shew of Good-breeding, and keep up a perpetual Intercourse of Civilities, their Tools that are dispersed in these outlying Parts will not so much as mingle together at a Cockmatch. This Humour fills the Country with several periodical Meetings of Whig Jockies and Tory Fox-hunters; not to mention the innumerable Curses, Frowns, and Whispers it produces at a Quarter-Sessions.
I do not know whether I have observed in any of my former Papers, that my Friends Sir
Roger De Coverley