ΟΜΝΙΑΝΑ. 170. Seat of Courage. In the last and fatal battle, when Arthur was mortally hurt, and all his knights perished, the old king Agui sans especially distinguished himself, et fist tant de proesse que tous sen esmerveillerent dont elle proesse venoit a l'homme de son age, car ja estoit vieil et ancien: mais ce luy venoit du grant couraige que il avoit au ventre. VOL. II. Lancelot du Lac, p. 3, ff, 157. B Every body knows where the seat of honour is, and I have seen the pineal gland handed round upon a saucer at an anatomical lecture, as the seat of the soul:"Seat of the soul, gentlemen; that is supposed to be the seat of the soul." But this is, the first time I ever found it affirmed that the seat of courage is in the belly. 171. Sensibility. In an obscure and short-lived periodical publication, which has long since been used off as "winding sheets for herrings and pilchards," I met with one paragraph, which deserves preservation, as connected with public evils in general, as well as more particularly with a subject. noticed in the former volume*. "There is observable among the many, a false and bastard sensibility, prompting them to remove those evils and those alone, which disturb their enjoyments by being * No. 160, page 317. Other miseries, present to their senses. though equally certain and far more terrible, they not only do not endeavour to remedy; they support them, they fatten on them. Provided the dunghill be not before their parlour-window, they are well content to know that it exists, and that it is the hot bed of their luxuries. "To this grievous failing we must attribute the frequency of war, and the long continuance of the slave-trade. The merchant found no argument against it in his ledger; the citizen at the crowded feast was not nauseated by the filth of the slave vessel; the fine lady's nerves were not shattered by the shrieks. She could sip a beverage sweetened with the product of human blood, and worse than that, of human guilt, and weep the while over the refined sorrows of Werter or of Clementina. But SENSIBILITY IS NOT BENEVOLENCE. Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently precludes it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, like the princes of Hell in Milton's Pandæmoniam, sit enthroned "bulky and vast :" while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are crowded, an innumerable multitude! into some dark corner of the heart. There is one criterion, by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere sensibility. Benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial." 172. Text Sparring. When I hear (as who now can travel twenty miles in a stage coach without the probability of hearing !) an ignorant religionist quote an unconnected sentence of half a dozen words from any part of the old or new testament, and resting on the literal sense of these words the eternal misery of all who re ject, nay, even of all those countless myriads, who have never had the opportunity of accepting, this, and sundry other articles of faith conjured up by the same textual magic; I ask myself, what idea these persons form of the bible, that they should use it in a way which they themselves use no other book in? They deem the whole written by inspiration. Well! but is the very essence of rational discourse, ¿ e. connection and dependency, done away, because the discourse is infallibly rational? The mysteries, which these spiritual Lynxes detect in the simplest texts, remind me of the 500 non-descripts, each as large as his own black cat, which Dr. Katterfelto, by aid of his solar microscope, discovered in a drop of transparent water. But to a contemporary, who has not thrown his lot in the same helmet with them, these fanatics think it a crime to listen. Let them then, or far rather, |