and impatience of inactivity, fill a camp with adventurers, add rank to rank, and squadron to squadron.

Memoirs of the King of Prussia.

Aphorisms.

We frequently fall into error and folly, not because the true principles of action are not known, but because, for a time, they are not remembered: he may therefore justly be numbered among the benefactors of mankind, who contracts the great rules of life into short sentences, that may be easily impressed on the memory, and taught, by frequent recollection, to recur habitually to the mind.

Books.

Rambler, vol. 4.

"Books," says Bacon, " can never teach the use of books." The student must learn by commerce with mankind to reduce his speculations to practice, and accommodate his knowledge to the purposes of life.

Ibid. vol. 3.

No man should think so highly of himself as to imagine he could receive no lights from books, nor so meanly, as to be

lieve he can discover nothing but what is to be learned from them.

Life of Dr. Boerhaave.

When a language begins to teem with books, it is tending to refinement, as those who undertake to teach others must have undergone some labour in improving themselves; they set a proportionate value on their own thoughts, and wish to enforce them by efficacious expressions. Speech becomes imbodied and permanent; different modes and phrases are compared, and the best obtain an establishment. By degrees one age improves upon another; exactness is first obtained, and afterwards elegance. But diction merely vocal is always in its childhood as no man leaves his eloquence behind him, the new generations have all to learn. There may possibly be books without a polished language, but there can be nɔ polished language without books.

Benefits.

Western Islands.

It is not necessary to refuse benefits from a bad man, when the acceptance implies no approbation of his crimes: nor has the subordinate officer any obligation to exam

ine the opinions or conduct of those under whom he acts, except that he may not be made the instrument of wickedness.

Burlesque.

Life of Addison

We

Burlesque consists in a disproportion between the style and the sentiments, or between the adventitious sentiments and the fundamental subject. It, therefore, like all bodies compounded of heterogeneous parts, contains in it a principle of corruption. All disproportion is unnatural, and from what is unnatural we can derive only the pleasure which novelty produces. admire it a while as a strange thing; but when it is no longer strange, we perceive its deformity. It is a kind of artifice, which, by frequent repetition, detects itself; and the reader, learning in time what he is to expect, lays down his book; as the spectator turns away from a second exhibition of those tricks, of which the only use is, to show that they can be played.

Beauty.

Life of Butler.

Beauty is well known to draw after it the persecutions of impertinence; to incite the artifices of envy, and to raise the

flames of unlawful love; yet among ladies whom prudence or modesty have made most eminent, who has ever complained of the inconveniences of an amiable form, or would have purchased safety by the loss of charms? Rambler, vol. 3.

The Danger of Beauty.

The teeming mother, anxious for her race,
Begs for each birth the fortune of a face;
Yet Vane could tell what ills from Beauty spring,
And Sedley curs'd the form that pleas'd a king.
Ye nymphs of rosy lips and radiant eyes,
Whom pleasure keeps too busy to be wise;
Whom joys with soft varieties invite,

By day the frolic, and the dance by night;
Who frown with vanity, who smile with art,
And ask the latest fashion of the heart;

What care, what rules, your heedless charms shal'

save,

Each nymph your rival, and each youth your slave?

Against your fame with fondness hate combines,
The rival batters, and the lover mines.
With distant voice neglected Virtue calls,
Less heard and less, the faint remonstrance falls :
'Tir'd with contempt she quits the slipp'ry reign,
And Pride and Prudence take her seat in vain ;
In crowd at once, where none the pass defend,
The harmless freedom and the private friend.

The guardians yield by force superior plied,
To int'rest, Prudence; and to flatt'ry, Pride;
Now Beauty falls betray'd, despis'd, distress'd,
And hissing Infamy proclaims the rest.

Vanity of Human Wishes

Biography.

The necessity of complying with times, and of sparing persons, is the great impediment of biography. History may be formed from permanent monuments and records, but lives can only be written from personal knowledge, which is growing every day less, and in a short time is lost for ever. What is known can seldom be immediately told, and when it might be told, is no longer known. Life of Addison.

The writer of his own life has at least the first qualification of an historian, the knowledge of the truth; and though it may plausibly be objected, that his temptations to disguise it are equal to his opportunities of knowing it, yet it cannot but be thought, that impartiality may be expected with equal confidence from him that relates the passages of his own life, as from him that delivers the transactions of another. What is collected by conjecture (and by