LIX. The style of conversation in request in courts proceeds much upon the same principle. It is low, and it is little. I have known a few persons who have had access to the Presence (and who might be supposed to catch what they could of the tone of royalty at second-hand, bating the dignity—God knows there was nothing of that!) and I should say they were the highest finishers in this respect I ever met with. No circumstance escaped them, they worked out all the details (whether to the purpose or not) like a fac-simile, they mimicked every thing, explained every thing; the story was not told, but acted over again. It is true, there were no grandes pensées, there was a complete truce with all thought and reflection; but they were everlasting dealers in matters of fact, and there was no end of their minute prolixity—one must suppose this mode pleased their betters, or was copied from them. Dogberry’s declaration—‘Were I as tedious as a king, I could find in my heart to bestow it all upon your worship’—is not so much a blunder of the clown’s, as a sarcasm of the poet’s. Are we to account for the effect (as before) from supposing that their overstrained attention to great things makes them seek for a change in little ones?—Or that their idea of themselves as raised above every one else is confirmed by dwelling on the meanest and most insignificant objects?—Or is it that from their ignorance and seclusion from the world, every thing is alike new and wonderful to them? Or that dreading the insincerity of those about them, they exact an extraordinary degree of trifling accuracy, and require every one to tell a story, as if he was giving evidence on oath before a court of justice? West said that the late King used to get him up into a corner, and fairly put his hands before him so that he could not get away, till he had got every particular out of him relating to the affairs of the Royal Academy. This weakness in the mind of kings has been well insisted on by Peter Pindar. It is of course like one of the spots in the sun.
LX. I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.
LXI. Happy are they that can say with Timon—‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind!’ They can never be at a loss for subjects to exercise their spleen upon: their sources of satisfaction must hold out while the world stands. Those who do not pity others, assuredly need not envy them: if they take pleasure in the distresses of their fellow-creatures, they have their wish. Let them cast an eye on that long disease, human life, on that villainous compound, human nature, and glut their malice. There is madness, there is idiotcy, there is sickness, old age, and death; there is the cripple, the blind, and the deaf; there is the deformed in body, the weak in mind, the prisoner and the gaoler, the beggar and the dwarf; there is poverty, labour, pain, ignominy; there is riches, pride, griping avarice, bloated luxury; there is the agony of suffering or the lassitude of ennui; there is the sickness of the heart from hope delayed, and the worse and more intolerable sickness from hope attained; there is the gout, the stone, the plague, cold, fever, thirst, and nakedness, shipwreck, famine, fire and the sword, all are instruments of human fate, and pamper the dignity of human nature: there are the racking pains of jealousy, remorse, and anguish, the lingering ones of disappointment, sorrow, and regret; there is the consciousness of unmerited, hopeless obscurity, and ‘the cruel sunshine thrown by fortune on a fool;’ there is unrequited love, and—marriage; there is the coquet slighting others and slighted in her turn, the jilt, the antiquated prude, the brutal husband, and the common-place wife; there are vows of celibacy and lost character; there is the cabal, the idle gossiping, the churlishness and dulness of the country, the heartlessness and profligacy of great cities; there are the listless days, the sleepless nights, the having too much or too little to do; years spent in vain in a pursuit, or, if successful, the having to leave it at last; there are the jealousies of different professions among themselves or of each other, lawyers, divines, physicians, artists; the contempt of the more thriving for the less fortunate, and the hatred and heart-burnings with which it is repaid; there is hypocrisy, oppression, falsehood, treachery, cowardice, selfishness, meanness; the luck of fools, the respectability of knaves; the cant of piety, loyalty, and humanity; the lamentations of West-India planters over the ingratitude of their negro slaves, and Louis XVIII. resigning to God and the Mother of all Saints the credit of the success of his arms; there are sects and parties, kings and their subjects, queens and common-council men, speeches in Parliament, plays and actors damned, or successful for a time and then laid on the shelf, and heard of no more; quacks at all corners, mountebanks in the pulpit, and drones in the state, peace and war, treaties of offence and defence, conspiracies, revolutions, Holy Alliances, the sudden death of Lord Castlereagh, and the oratory of his successor Mr. Canning, hid for the present like the moon ‘in its vacant interlunar cave;’ and Ferdinand and his paper-kites, and the Cortes, unconscious of the rebel maxim, ‘Catch a king and kill a king’; and Slop raving at the bloodthirsty victims of courtly assassins, and whetting mild daggers for patriot throats; and Mr. Croker’s cheat-the-gallows face in the Quarterly, and Lord Wellington’s heart in the cause of Spanish liberty, and a beloved Monarch retired amid all this to shady solitude ‘to play with Wisdom.’ A good hater may here find wherewithal to feed the largest spleen and swell it, even to bursting!
LXII. Happiness, like mocking, is catching. At least, none but those who are happy in themselves, can make others so. No wit, no understanding, neither riches nor beauty, can communicate this feeling—the happy alone can make happy. Love and Joy are twins, or born of each other.
LXIII. No one knows when he is safe from ridicule.
LXIV. Is it a misfortune or a happiness that we so often like the faults of one we love better than the virtues of any other woman; that we like her refusals, better than all other favours; that we like her love of others, better than any one else’s love of us?
LXV. If a man were refused by a woman a thousand times, and he really loved her, he would still think that at the bottom of her heart she preferred him to every one else. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider that all passion is a species of madness; and that the feeling in the mind towards the beloved object is the most amiable and delightful thing in the world. Our love to her is heavenly, and so (the heart whispers us) must hers be to us—though it were buried at the bottom of the sea; nay, from the tomb our self-love would revive it! We never can persuade ourselves that a mistress cares nothing about us, till we no longer care about her. No! It is certain that there is nothing truly deserving of love but love, and
‘In spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite,’
we still believe in the justice of the blind God!
LXVI. It would be easy to forget a misplaced attachment, but that we do not like to acknowledge ourselves in the wrong.