If cold, if stern, to courtlier ear, Ev'n praise by Freedom poured, appear, How Doubt hath stol'n her fire from Truth- Yet, oh! what glory waits his mind, Who with firm step and dauntless gaze * When Hartley, (Observations on Man, vol. i. 304,) speaking of private morals, said, "great care ought to be taken not to esteem our friend a nonpareil," and "that it is a great injury to any man to think more highly of him than he deserves;" he uttered what, if taken in the seeming sense, not that in which the speculator meant it, Age calls at once a moral, and Youth a meanness. But in private life, after all, it is wiser in the long run to confide than to suspect. In public life all experience tells us the reverse. What Epicharmus said more than two thousand years ago, and Polybius (whose actual experience in the world gave not the least merit to his noble history) has so emphatically retailed, hath lost none of its melancholy wisdom by time. "In distrust are the nerves of the mind." But in Earth's Common Soul each deed That serves mankind, records its meed. It lives with all men honour most- But why to THEE this worthless strain ?— No type-no token of the time. What in this tale may we descry? The moral men in vain deny! Behold the Two whom Heaven had made Till what should strengthen-can but gall. To one, 'tis true, the irksome chain But in the moodier Twin, our verse But mark as we proceed-and grows Mark yet-if we could all release Are there no Orders like that two- And makes that hell-UNEQUAL LAWS ?* 66 * An expression that owes none of its warmth to poetry-impartial law has been confounded with the Deity himself. God being as the writer de Mundo well expresses it, vóμos lookλins, an impartial law, R Release is then the surest tie Here pause we nor the rest supply! Enough-and now forgive the rhyme and as Plato, μéтрov таvтwv, the measure of all things."-Cudworth's Intellectual System, vol. i. 425. If James the First was right when he said, "Since the devil is the very contrary opposite to God, there can be no better way to know God than by the contrary ;"-(Demonologie, book ii.) it must be allowed that we have given his majesty's plan of knowing God a very long trial! |