at the beginning and detestable at the end; Augustus and Titus, of those who were good at the end, and infamous at the beginning. It must, however, be confessed, that few men's memories have been safe from accusation. Pertinax has been accused of corruption by one historian *, and of having been accessory to a murder by anothert. The impartial voice of general history, however, pronounces him equal, in many essential particulars, to Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. No man's memory, in fact, has been safe: even Alfred is accused of having been, in the early part of his reign, immoral and despotic, haughty ‡, and disregardful of the oppressed and indigent §. CXXXV. WHO DO NEITHER GOOD NOR EVIL. It is a great mark of mental weakness, when men permit themselves to be drawn back in their attempts to fulfil good intentions. This was so decidedly the opinion of Antonio Guevara, that he even went so far as to assert, that though heaven will be filled with those who have done good works, yet hell will be peopled with those who intended to do them. There are some qualities which vibrate between virtues and vices. They produce neither good nor evil; reminding us of the groves of Egypt, which have neither flowers, rivulets, nor verdure. *Herodian. † Julian. ‡ Vit. St. Neoti in act. SS. Ben. Sæc. iv. tom. iv. 330, 1. It is easy for those who have good fortunes, no wives, no children, few opportunities for the indulgence of ambition;-it is, in fact, easy for those, who are never tried by the interests or passions of human nature, to be what is styled virtuous; that is, to keep their words, to pay their debts, to be constant at church, and to do no harm. Their complaints and querilities, however, are, perhaps, sins not less great than the deviations of those tried in difficulty and distress. Dante seems to have had a curious detestation of those who, doing neither good nor evil, live without praise and die without censure. He condemns them, for a time, to the bottomless pit! they are the first persons whom he meets in that dreary region; but Virgil being his guide, he makes that poet exclaim: 'Say no'thing to them. They are alike disdained by Mercy and 'Justice. Look; and pass them by*.' Surely this was rather too severe a punishment. For if men of this kind do us no good, they do us no harm; and to say of a man, he has done me no harm,' is one good reason for wishing him well. " Forgive, then, thou bustler in concerns Of little worth, an idler in the best, If, author of no mischief, and some good, He seek his proper happiness by means That may advance, but cannot hinder, thine.'-Couper. That motives are the life and soul of all noble actions has been a canon for appreciators from the time of Plutarch; but those, who serve men, will never be loved * Inferno, cant. iii, 34. so much as those who please them: and this applies with peculiar force to those who want, 'As through blank life they dream along, Sense to be right, and passion to be wrong? Young. Universal Passion. CXXXVI. MEN OF HONOUR; HONOURABLE MEN. GENERALLY speaking, few men, after forty, care much for the opinions of others, as long as their worldly affairs thrive. As to what are ludicrously called 'Men of honour,' I shall say little; men of honour being, in modern acceptance, those who pay their debts of chance; keep a secret in respect to intrigues; are absurd enough to suffer themselves to be shot at to gratify other men's folly; or villains enough, in unworthy causes, to require the blood of an adversary to gratify their own. Men of honour are very equivocal kind of persons: -honourable men are the glory of society. Boileau seems to have entertained ideas not much dissimilar. • "Tis everywhere the same t,' said he,- By land or sea; Honour you'll find the universal plea. The cit, who cheats behind his counter board, * A person, who had lent Mr. Fox a sum of money upon bond under very pressing circumstances, having learned that he had received some money, pressed for payment; upon which Mr. Fox told him, that he should be happy to do it, but that he was bound to pay some debts of honour. Upon this the creditor thrust his bond into the fire, and said, 'Now, Sir, mine is a debt of honour.' + Sat. xi. CXXXVII. SELF-CONTRASTS. CONCEIVE a thought; and its opposite frequently springs up, as it were, side by side. Machiavel might have won the laurel as a writer of comedy, had he not chosen to compile history, to form precepts, and to chastise tyrants: so true is it, that the severest genius is, sometimes, the most alive to humorous representations. Had Machiavel not chosen to deviate from comedy, he had, perhaps, forestalled Falstaff; for if his genius assimilated with that of Tacitus in regard to historic qualifications, his talents were not, in another way, unassociated with those of Rabelais and Cervantes, Butler and Swift. Some possess talents almost as distant,-speaking by an hyperbole,—as the planet Herschel from the northern wain. Boscovich, for instance, united the elegant with the mathematical; and clothed intricate subjects of theory and calculation in a style* peculiarly elegant and harmonious. Montuari of Modena had genius and a love of labour to observe, that one hundred changes had taken place in the relative situations of the fixed stars; and yet he was distinguished for a profound knowledge in subjects relating to civil and ecclesiastical jurisprudence. D'Alembert united a strong mathematical genius to an elegant taste for polite literature; but Diderot's brilliancy of thought was frequently lost amid words, to glean a meaning from *See De Solis ac Luna Defectibus. which is, occasionally, almost as difficult as it is to find a meaning in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Darwin collected a vast number of useful facts, and made a multitude of observations in his Zoonomia, Phytologia, Botanic Garden, and Temple of Nature; yet his pages are deteriorated by eccentricities, scarcely to have been expected from a man who had read Nature largely and intimately in many various details. Locke, a friend to religious liberty, drew up a constitution for the colonists of Carolina so aristocratic, and so little in harmony with his own doctrines in respect to religious liberty, that nothing but discord and confusion resulted from it. William Penn, on the other hand, established harmony and happiness, by keeping faith with the original inhabitants; establishing civil and religious liberty; and instituting courts of arbitration rather than of law. Cowley, who was so stiff a writer in verse, as sometimes to be disregardful of all harmony, was yet, in prose, placid, easy, and natural. His editor, Bishop Hurd, was, in his writings, all ease, urbanity, and elegance; but in the relations of life he was so distant, that Cradock, who lived near him and knew him well, assures us, that he was not at all admired by those, who did not estimate him in a literary capacity, since he looked with disdain upon all unlearned persons. It could not, therefore, be said of him, as it was of Nicholas Poussin, that though an Athenian in mental refine'ment, he was a Spartan in his habits of life;' but that he was a rector, an archdeacon, a bishop. In one particular, too, he resembled a person, with whom he would |