379. MUSTAPHA, HEIR TO SOLYMAN THE MAGNIFICENT, STRANGLED BY HIS FATHER'S ORDERS, A.D. 1553. At sight of his father's furious and unrelenting countenance, Mustapha's strength failed, and his courage forsook him; the mutes fastened the bowstring about his neck, and in a moment put an end to his life. The dead body was exposed before the Sultan's tent. The soldiers gathered round it, and contemplating that mournful object with astonishment, and sorrow, and indignation, were ready, if a leader had not been wanting, to have broke out into the wildest excesses of rage. After giving vent to the first expressions of their grief, they retired each man to his tent, and shutting themselves up, bewailed in secret the cruel fate of their favourite; nor was there one of them who tasted bread, or even water, during the remainder of that day. Next morning the same solitude and silence reigned in the camp: and the Solyman, being afraid that some dreadful storm would follow this sullen calm, in order to appease the enraged soldiers, deprived Rustan of his office and ordered him to leave the camp.

W. ROBERTSON

380. CHARACTER OF HENRY VIII. KING OF ENGLAND. This I may boldly assever, that he was blest of God above all kings and princes that ever I have read of, and happy was that prince that might stand most in his favour; for the which divers made great suit, and especially when they stood in need of aid against their enemies, because they perceived that fortune followed his power as handmaid to all his proceedings. A rare example no doubt it is, and meseemeth most strange, that one king should reign thirty-eight years, and that almost in continual wars, and never take foil, but always prevail as a victor invicted, which, without the assistance of Almighty God, he could never have achieved; an evident token that God was on his side, and therefore who could stand against him. To write at large of all his worthiness and incomparable acts would fill a volume, and were too great a charge for my unskilful pen. But he was a prince of singular prudence, of passing stout courage, of invincible fortitude, of dexterity wonderful. He was a springing well of eloquence, a rare spectacle of humanity: of civility and good nature an absolute president, a special pattern of clemency and moderation, a worthy example of regal justice, a bottomless spring of largess and benignity. He was in all the

honest arts and faculties profoundly seen, in all liberal discipline equal with the best, in no kind of literature inexpert. He was to the world an ornament, to England a treasure, to his friends a comfort, to his foes a terrour, to his faithful and loving subjects a tender father, to innocents a sure protector, to wilful malefactors a sharp scourge, to his common weal and good people a quiet haven and anchor of safeguard, to the disturbers of the same a rock of extermination. In heinous and intolerable crimes against the commonwealth a severe judge, in like offences committed against himself a ready port and refuge of mercy, except to such as would persist incorrigibly. A man he was in gifts of nature and of grace peerless; and to conclude a man above all praises. Such a king did God set to reign over England, whereof this realm may well vaunt above other nations, whose worthiness is more treated of by foreign writers than by any of our own countrymen, which may justly redound to the reproach of all our English poets and historians.

ULPIAN FULWELL

381. LETTER TO HIS MOTHER ON THE LOSS OF HIS AUNT. The unhappy news I have just received from you equally surprises and afflicts me. I have lost a person I

loved very much and have been used to from my infancy; but am much more concerned for your loss, the circumstances of which I forbear to dwell upon, as you must be too sensible of them yourself; and will, I fear, more and more need a consolation which no one can give except He who has preserved her to you so many years, and at last when it was His pleasure has taken her from us to Himself: and perhaps if we reflect upon what she felt in this life, we may look upon this as an instance of His goodness both to her, and to those that loved her. She might have languished many years before our eyes in a continual increase of pain and totally helpless; she might have long wished to end her misery without being able to attain it; or perhaps even lost all sense and yet continued to breathe; a sad spectacle to such as must have felt more for her than she could have done for herself. However you may deplore your own loss, yet think that she is at last easy and happy; and has now more occasion to pity us than we her. I hope and beg you will support yourself with that resignation we owe to Him, who gave us our being for our good, and who deprives us of it for

the same reason. I would have come to you directly, but you do not say whether you desire I should or not; if you do, I beg I may know it, for there is nothing to hinder me and I am in very good health.

T. GRAY

If man's con

382. THE EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. trivance, or if the favour of accident, could have given to Christianity any of its apparent testimonies; either its miracles or its prophecies, its morals or its propagation, or, if I may so speak, its Founder, there could be no room to believe, nor even to imagine, that all these appearances of great credibility could be united together by any such causes. If a successful craft could have contrived its public miracles, or so much as the pretence of them, it required another reach of craft and new resources to provide and adapt its prophecies to the same object. Further, it demanded not only a different art, but a totally opposite character, to conceive and promulgate its admirable morals. Again, the achievement of its propagation, in defiance of the powers and terrors of the world, implied a new energy of personal genius, and other qualities of action, than any concurring in the work before. Lastly, the mode of life of its Founder, in the very description of it, is a work of so much originality and wisdom, as could be the offspring only of consummate powers of invention; though, to speak more fairly to the case, it seems, by an intuitive evidence, as if it could never have been even devised, but must have come from the life and reality of some perfect excellence of virtue, impossible to be taken from, or confounded with, the fictions of ingenuity. But the hypothesis sinks under its incredibility. For each of these suppositions of contrivance being arbitrary, as it certainly is, and unsupported, the climax of them is an extravagance. And if the imbecility of Art is foiled in the hypothesis, the combinations of Accident are too vain to be thought of. The genuine state of the Christian evidence is this: there is unambiguous testimony to its works of miraculous powers; there are oracles of prophecy: there are other distinct marks and signs of a divine original within it. And no stock but that of truth could in one subject produce them all, or can now account for their existence.

J. DAVISON

If time be, as

383. PROPER EMPLOYMENT OF TIME. Theophrastus called it truly, a thing of most precious value1 or expense, as it were a great folly to lavish it away unprofitably, so to be frugal thereof and careful to lay it out for the best advantage, especially every man having so little store thereof, must be a special point of prudence. To be covetous of time, Seneca tells us, is a commendable avarice2; it being necessary for the accomplishment of any worthy enterprise ; there being nothing excellent that can soon or easily be effected. Surely he that hath much and great business to despatch, and but a little time allowed for it, is concerned to husband it well; not to lose it wholly in idleness; not to trifle it away in unnecessary divertisements: above all not to create obstacles to himself by pursuing matters of a tendency quite contrary to the success of his main undertaking. 'Tis our case: we are obliged here to negotiate in business of infinite price and consequence to us, no less than our eternal happiness; and we see that our time to drive it on and bring it to a happy issue is very scant and short. The great father of physicians did quicken the students of that faculty to diligence by admonishing them in the first place, setting it in the front of his famous aphorisms, that ‘life is short and art is long.' And how much more so is the art of living well, that most excellent and necessary art; for indeed virtue is not a gift of nature but a work of art; an effect of labour and study; this, I say, most needful and useful art of living virtuously and piously; this art of preserving and recovering our soul's health, how much longer is it?

I. BARROW

384. EFFECTS OF A LIFE OF LABOUR ON THE UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE POOR. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him, not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just 1 πολυτελέστατον ἀνάλωμα.

2 nulla nisi temporis honesta est avaritia.

It

judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging: and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain and adventurous life of a soldier. corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance, in any other employment than that to which he has been bred. But in every improved and civilised society this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless Government take some pains to prevent it.

A. SMITH

385. PREVALENT FASHION OF CENSURING PUBLIC OFFICERS. Nothing in this busy and licentious age is more usual, than for private men to invade the office, to exercise the duties, to canvass and control the actions of their superiors; discussing what they ought to do, and prescribing laws to them; taxing what is done by them; murmuring at their decrees, and inveighing against their proceedings: every one is finding holes in the state, and picking quarrels with the conduct of political affairs: every one is reforming and settling the public according to models framed in his own conceit. Things (saith one) are out of order, and the constitution is very defective, and ought to be corrected; such a law in all should be repealed, and such a one enacted. No, clamours another no less eagerly, all things stand as well as can be, nothing can be amended, or ought to be altered; our establishment in all respects is more perfect than Plato's commonwealth, or the State of Utopia. Thus doth each man appoint himself counsellor of state, and turns legislator without any call from the king or choice from the country. Every one snatcheth at the sceptre, and invests himself with the senator's robe; not considering the wrong he committeth, nor the arrogance he practiseth, nor the mischiefs which naturally ensue upon such demeanour. For to direct, or to check governors, is in effect to exauctorate or depose them, substituting ourselves in their room; and what greater injury can we do them or the public? To fix or reverse laws, belongeth to the highest authority and deepest wisdom,