EVERY MAN JUDGES FROM HIMSELF.

WE measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves. Nash, a poet, poor enough, (as poets used to be,) seeing an alderman with a gold chain upon his great horse, by way of scorn said to one of his companions, "Do you see yon fellow-how goodly, how big he looks?-why, that fellow cannot make a blank verse."

Nay, we measure the goodness of God from ourselves: we measure his goodness, his justice, his wisdom, by something we call just, good, wise in ourselves. And in so doing, we judge proportionably to the country fellow in the play; who said, if he were a king, he would live like a lord, and have pease and bacon every day, and a whip that cried Slash.

Selden.

So Warburton says, the Bigot reverses the order of creation, and makes God in man's image; choosing the very ugliest pattern to model from-namely, himself.

SELF-LOVE.

Ir is the nature of self-lovers as they will set a house on fire and it were but to roast their eggs. Wisdom for a man's self is in many branches thereof a depraved thing. It is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house somewhat before it fall.

Bacon.

“Enlighten self-interest," cries the philosopher, "do but sufficiently enlighten it!"—We ourselves have seen enlightened self-interests ere now; and truly, for the most part, their light was only as that of a horn-lantern; sufficient to guide the bearer himself out of various puddles-but to us and the world of comparatively small advantage. And figure the human species like an endless host seeking its way onwards through undiscovered Time, in black darkness, save that each had his horn-lantern, and the van-guard some few of glass.

Carlyle.

IT IS A POOR CENTRE OF A MAN'S ACTIONS-HIMSELF.

Bacon.

PREJUDICES.

"No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged instructors. They may in the end prove wiser than he."

Many of our men of speculation, instead of exploding general prejudices, employ their sagacity to discover the latent wisdom which prevails in them. If they find what they seek, and they seldom fail, they think it more wise to continue the prejudice, with the reason involved, than to cast away the coat of prejudice and leave the naked reason; because prejudice, with its reason, has a motive to give action to that reason, and an affection which will give it permanence. Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency: it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, sceptical, puzzled, and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit, and not a series of unconnected acts.

Burke.

MUSIC.

"MUCH music marreth men's manners," saith Galen. Although some men will say that it doth not so, but rather recreateth and maketh quick a man's mind; yet methinks, by reason, it doth as honey doth to a man's stomach, which at first receiveth it well, but afterward it maketh it unfit to abide any strong nourishing meat. And even so in a manner these instruments make a man's wit so soft and smooth, so tender and quaisy, that they be less able to brook strong and rough study. Wits be not sharpened, but rather made blunt, with such soft sweetness, even as good edges be blunted which men whet upon soft chalk-stones.

R. Ascham.

Plato allowed but of two kinds of music in his republic; the Martial, and the Sedate. He forbad the luxurious, the doleful, the sentimental. And Aristophanes complains of the new intricate divisions that were in his day superseding the simple plain-song of more heroic times.

One may conceive that Handel is wholesomer for a people than Bellini.

GENIUS.

THE French were distressed that Dumont claimed to have supplied their Mirabeau with materials for his eloquence. "Good people," said Goethe, “ as if their Hercules, or any Hercules, must not be well fed-as if the Colossus must not be made of parts. What is Genius but the faculty of seizing things from right and left-here a bit of marble, there a bit of brass-and breathing life into them ?"

"If children," he says elsewhere, "grew up according to early indications, we should have nothing but Geniuses: but growth is not merely development; the various organic systems that constitute one man, spring from one another, follow each other, change into each other, supplant each other, and even consume each other; so that after a time, scarce a trace is left of many aptitudes and abilities."

H