That all my heart I gave unto his hold.’
‘All which, though we most potently believe, yet we hold it not honesty to have it thus set down.’
[33]. At Salisbury, which is a cathedral and county town, you cannot get a copy of Congreve or Wycherley at any of the shops.
[34]. The knack of off-hand, unprincipled, idle fabrication is not assisted, but the contrary, by general knowledge or regular education. Women, for this reason, have the better of their husbands in trumping up sudden excuses and contrivances that have no foundation in fact or reason; and their servant maids, who are more uneducated still, beat them hollow at the same paltry game of cross-purposes.
[35]. It is observed and perhaps justly that the members of the Established Church are the pleasantest sort of people to deal with. Dissenters are more soured by the leaven of religion. The others do not trouble themselves enough about it to come to a conclusion of their own, or to quarrel with other people who do. They are religious merely out of conformity to the practice of the age and country in which they live, and follow that which has authority and numbers on its side.
[36]. There is a common inversion of this opinion, which is desperation; or the becoming reckless of all consequences, poverty, disease, or death, from disappointment in some one thing that the mind is set upon, no matter what. A man who has been jilted of his first choice marries out of spite the first woman he meets. A girl, whose sweetheart goes to sea, because she will not have him, as soon as he is gone, and she is baulked of her fancy, runs a-muck at ruin and infamy—
‘As men should serve a cucumber,
She throws herself away!’
Losing gamesters act nearly on the same infatuated principle. Harrel, in Cecilia, makes a fine hair-brained mock-heroic exit. I declare I prefer it to the termination of Gray’s Bard. Gamesters and highwaymen are so far heroes that it is neck or nothing with them: they set consequences at defiance. Their actions are disinterested; but their motives are not so. A fortune-hunting General stands much in the same predicament. The abstracted, the ideal, is necessary to the true heroic. But before a man can fight for an idea, he must have an idea in his head to fight for. Now there are some Generals that are not understood to possess this qualification of the heroic character.
[37]. It has been suggested whether this phrase ‘insulted’ is not too modern.