[13]. Is this a verbal fallacy? Or in the close, retired, sheltered scene which I have imagined to myself, is not the sunflower a natural accompaniment of the sun-dial?
[14].
‘Once more, companion of the lonely hour,
I’ll turn thee up again.’
Bloomfield’s Poems—The Widow to her Hour-glass.
[15]. Rousseau has admirably described the effect of bells on the imagination in a passage in the Confessions, beginning ‘Le son des cloches m’a toujours singulièrement affecté,’ &c.
[16]. I have heard it said that carpenters, who do every thing by the square and line, are honest men, and I am willing to suppose it. Shakspeare, in the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ makes Snug the Joiner the moral man of the piece.
[17]. Mr. Bentham proposes to new-model the penal code, on the principle of a cool and systematic calculation of consequences. Yet of all philosophers, the candidates for Panopticons and Penitentiaries are the most short-sighted and refractory. Punishment has scarcely any effect upon them. Thieves steal under the scaffold; and if a person’s previous feelings and habits do not prevent his running the risk of the gallows, assuredly the fear of consequences, or his having already escaped it, with all the good resolutions he may have made on the occasion, will not prevent his exposing himself to it a second time. It is true, most people have a natural aversion to being hanged. The perseverance of culprits in their evil courses seems a fatality, which is strengthened by the prospect of what is to follow. Mr. Bentham argues that all ‘men act from calculation, even madmen reason.’ So far it may be true that the world is not unlike a great Bedlam, or answers to the title of an old play—‘A Mad World, my masters!’ This is our world, but not his. Life, on looking back to it, too often resembles a disturbed dream, which does not infer its having been guided by reason in its progress.
[18]. [‘Have I not seen a household where love was not?’ says the author of the ‘Betrothed;’ ‘where, although there was worth and good will, and enough of the means of life, all was embittered by regrets, which were not only vain, but criminal?’—‘I would take the Ghost’s word for a thousand pound,’ or in preference to that of any man living, though I was told in the streets of Edinburgh, that Dr. Jamieson, the author of the ‘Dictionary,’ was quite as great a man!]
[19]. Certes more Whigs become Tories. This may also be accounted for satisfactorily, though not very rationally.