based by vulgar mouths, and contaminated by inelegant applications. Life of Cowley.

English Language.

The affluence and comprehension of our language is very illustriously displayed in our poetical translations of ancient writers; a work which the French seem to relinquish in despair, and which we were long unable to perform with dexterity.

Life of Dryden.

From the time of Gower and Chaucer, the English writers have studied elegance, and advanced their language, by successive improvements, to as much harmony as it can easily receive, and as much copiousness as human knowledge has hitherto required, till every man now endeavours to excel others in accuracy, or outshine them in splendour of style; and the danger is, lest care should too soon pass to affectation. Idler, vol. 2.

Laws.

It is, perhaps, impossible to review the laws of any country, without discovering many defects, and many superfluities. Laws often continue when their reasons have ceased. Laws made for the first state

of the society continue unabolished when the general form of life is changed. Parts of the judicial procedure, which were at first only accidental, become, in time, essential; and formalities are accumulated on each other, till the art of litigation requires more study than the discovery of right.

Memoirs of the King of Prussia.

To embarrass justice by multiplicity of laws, or to hazard it by confidence in judges, seems to be the opposite rocks on which all civil institutions have been wrecked, and between which legislative wisdom has never yet found an open passage. Ibid.

A man accustomed to satisfy himself with the obvious and natural meaning of a sentence, does not easily shake off his habit; but a true bred lawyer never contents himself with one sense, when there is aniher to be found. Marmor Norfolciense.

Penal Laws.

Death is, as one of the ancients observes, "of dreadful things the most dreadful." An evil beyond which nothing can be threatened by sublunary power, or feared from human enmity or vengeance. This terror, therefore, should be reserved as the last re

sort of authority, as the strongest and most operative of prohibitory sanctions, and placed before the treasure of life to guard from invasion what cannot be restored. To equal robbery with murder, is to reduce murder to robbery, to confound in common minds the gradations of iniquity, and incite the commission of a greater crime, to prevent the detection of a less. If only murder was punished with death, very few robbers would stain their hands in blood; but when, by the last act of cruelty, no new danger is incurred, and greater security may be obtained, upon what principle shall we forbid them forbear?

Rambler, vol. 3.

Letter-Writing.

Letters on public business should be written with a mind more intent on things than words, and above the affectation of unseasonable elegance. The business of a statesman can be little forwarded by flowers of rhetoric. Life of Cowley.

Marriage

When we see the avaricious and crafty taking companions to their tables and their beds, without any inquiry but after farms and money; or the giddy and thoughtless

uniting themselves for life to those whom they have only seen by the light of tapers; when parents make articles for children without inquiring after their consent; when some marry for heirs to disappoint their brothers; and others throw themselves into the arms of those whom they do not love, because they have found themselves rejected where they were more solicitous to please; when some marry because their servants cheat them; some because they squander their own money; some because their houses are pestered with company; some because they will live like other people; and some because they are sick of themselves; we are not so much inclined to wonder that marriage is sometimes unhappy, as that it appears so little loaded with calamity; and cannot but conclude, that society has something in itself eminently agreeable to human nature, when we find its pleasures so great, that even the ill choice of a companion can hardly over-balance them. Those, therefore, of the above description, that should rail against matrimony, should be informed, that they are neither to wonder, nor repine, that a contract begun on such principles has ended in disappointment.

Rambler, vol

Marriage should be considered as the most solemn league of perpetual friendship; a state from which artifice and concealment are to be banished for ever; and in which every act of dissimulation is a breach of faith.

Rambler. vol. 4.

Early Marriages.

From early marriages proceed the rivalry of parents and children. l'he son is eager to enjoy the world before the father is willing to forsake it; and there is hardly room at once for two generations. The daughter begins to bloom before the mother can be content to fade; and neither can forbear to wish for the absence of the other. Prince of Abyssinia.

Man.

Man's study of himself, and the knowledge of his own station in the ranks of being, and his various relations to the innumerable multitudes which surround him, and with which his Maker has ordained him to be united, for the reception and communication of happiness, should begin with the first glimpse of reason, and only end with life itself. Other acquisitions are merely temporary benefits, except as they contribute to illustrate the knowledge, and