[52]. He had no idea of pictures, of Claude or Raphael, and at this time I had as little as he. He sometimes gives a striking account at present of the Cartoons at Pisa, by Buffamalco and others; of one in particular, where Death is seen in the air brandishing his scythe, and the great and mighty of the earth shudder at his approach, while the beggars and the wretched kneel to him as their deliverer. He would of course understand so broad and fine a moral as this at any time.
[53]. Some years ago, a periodical paper was published in London, under the title of the Pic-Nic. It was got up under the auspices of a Mr. Fulke Greville, and several writers of that day contributed to it, among whom were Mr. Horace Smith, Mr. Dubois, Mr. Prince Hoare, Mr. Cumberland, and others. On some dispute arising between the proprietor and the gentlemen-contributors on the subject of an advance in the remuneration for articles, Mr. Fulke Greville grew heroic, and said, ‘I have got a young fellow just come from Ireland, who will undertake to do the whole, verse and prose, politics and scandal, for two guineas a week, and if you will come and sup with me to-morrow night, you shall see him, and judge whether I am not right in closing with him,’ Accordingly, they met the next evening, and the WRITER OF ALL WORK was introduced. He began to make a display of his native ignorance and impudence on all subjects immediately, and no one else had occasion to say any thing. When he was gone, Mr. Cumberland exclaimed, ‘A talking potato, by God!’ The talking potato was Mr. Croker, of the Admiralty. Our adventurer shortly, however, returned to his own country, and passing accidentally through a town where they were in want of a ministerial candidate at an Election, the gentleman of modest assurance offered himself, and succeeded. ‘They wanted a Jack-pudding,’ said the father of the hopeful youth, ‘and so they chose my son.’ The case of the Duke of York and Mrs. Clarke soon after came on, and Mr. Croker, who is a dabbler in dirt, and an adept in love-letters, rose from the affair Secretary to the Admiralty, and the very ‘rose and expectancy of the fair State.’
[54]. The only friends whom we defend with zeal and obstinacy are our relations. They seem part of ourselves. We cannot shake them off till they are hanged, nor then neither! For our other friends we are only answerable, as long as we countenance them; and we therefore cut the connection as soon as possible. But who ever willingly gave up the good dispositions of a child, or the honour of a parent?
[55]. See Ada Reis.
[56]. This was necessary in Latin, where no order was observed in the words of a sentence: in English the juxtaposition generally determines the connection.
[57]. Quere, Is the vocative ever a case?
[58]. An identical proposition is not an inference; but all reasoning consists in inference, or in finding out one thing as implied in another. In comparing any two objects, I have nothing previously given and cannot predict the result; but having made the comparison, I have then something determined and fixed to go by; and what else I discover or imagine must be in conformity with this first knowledge. This coherence in propositions, or in the mind, is the force of reason, whereby one idea acts as the ground-work or cause of another. If I apply B as a common measure to A and C, and find it the same with both, it follows that they are equal to one another; since otherwise I must suppose the same thing (B) to be equal to unequal things, which is impossible as long as I retain my senses, or more properly, my recollection. I have ascertained two lines to be of the length of a third; that length cannot differ from itself; and therefore having settled what the two lines are with respect to the third, I cannot conceive them to be different with respect to one another, without forgetting myself, or what I know of them. If I had no power of contemplating different propositions together, I could draw no such conclusion; the conclusion therefore results from this comprehensive power of the mind; and reason is the end or band that ties the bundle of our separate ideas, or the logical fasciculus together.
[59]. This is the reason that low comedians generally come out in tragedy—they do not perceive the difference between the serious and the burlesque.
[60]. Berkeley, in his Minute Philosopher, attacks Dr. Halley, who had objected to faith and mysteries in religion, on this score; and contends that the mathematician, no less than the theologian, is obliged to presume on certain postulates, or to resort, before he could establish a single theorem, to a formal definition of those undefinable and hypothetical existences, points, lines, and surfaces; and, according to the ingenious and learned Bishop of Cloyne, solids would fare no better than superficials in this war of words and captious contradiction.
[61]. Hobbes is of opinion that men would deny this, if they had any interest in doing so.