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sir, showed her the absurdity of the levelling doctrine. She has never liked me since. Sir, your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them ?"-BOSWELL. Life of Johnson.

QUACKERY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.—In the course of my life I have often pleased or entertained myself with observing the various and fantastical changes of the diseases generally complained of, and of the remedies in common vogue, which were like birds of passage, very much seen or heard of at one season, and disappeared at another, and commonly succeeded by some of a very different kind. When I was very young, nothing was so much feared or talked of as rickets among children, and consumption among young people of both sexes. After these the spleen came in play, and grew a formal disease: then the scurvy, which was the general complaint, and both were thought to appear in many various guises. After these, and for a time, nothing was so much talked of as the ferment of the blood, which passed for the cause of all sorts of ailments, that neither physicians nor patients knew well what to make of. And to all these succeeded vapours, which serve the same turn, and furnish occasion of complaint among persons whose bodies or minds ail something, but they know not what, and among the Chinese would pass for mists of the mind or fumes of the brain, rather than indispositions of any other parts. Yet these employ our physicians, perhaps more than other diseases, who are fain to humour such patients in their fancies of being ill, and to prescribe some remedies for fear of losing their practice to others, that pretend more skill in finding out the cause of diseases or care in advising remedies, which neither they nor their patients find any effect of, besides some gains to one and amusement to the other. This, I suppose, may have contributed much to the mode of going to the waters, either cold or hot, upon so many occasions, or else upon none besides that of entertainment, and which commonly may have no other effect. And it is well if this be the worst of the frequent use of those waters, which, though commonly innocent, yet are sometimes dangerous, if the temper of the person or cause of the indisposition be unhappily mistaken, especially in people of age. As diseases have changed vogue, so have remedies in my time and observation. I remember at one time the taking of tobacco, at another the drinking of warm beer, proved for universal remedies; then swallowing of pebble stones, in imitation of falconers curing hawks. One doctor pretended to help all heats and fevers by drinking as much cold spring water as the patient could bear; at another time swallowing a spoonful of powder of sea-biscuit after meals was infallible for all indigestions, and so preventing diseases. Then coffee and tea began their successive reigns. The infusion or powder of steel have had their turns, and certain drops of several names and compositions; but none that I find have established their authority, either long or generally, by any constant and sensible successes of their reign, but have rather passed like a mode, which every one is apt to follow, and finds the most convenient or graceful while it lasts, and begins to dislike in both those respects when it goes out of fashion-SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE'S Miscellanea.

All of us, who are worth any thing, spend our manhood in unlearning the follies, or expiating the mistakes, of our youth.-SHELLEY. Letters.

Rage is essentially vulgar, and never vulgarer than when it proceeds from mortified pride, disappointed ambition, or thwarted wilfulness. A baffled despot is the vulgarest of dirty wretches, no matter whether he be the despot of a nation vindicating its rights, or of a donkey sinking under its load.-HARTLEY COLERIDGE. Biographia Borealis.

IMPEDIMENTS TO THE PROGRESS OF TRUTH.-Truth and error, as they are essentially opposite in their nature, so the causes to which they are indebted for their perpe

tuity and triumph are not less so. Whatever retards a spirit of inquiry, is favourable to error; whatever promotes it, to truth. But nothing, it will be acknowledged, has a greater tendency to obstruct the exercise of free inquiry than the spirit and feeling of a party. Let a doctrine, however erroneous, become a party distinction, and it is at once intrenched in interests and attachments which make it extremely difficult for the most powerful artillery of reason to dislodge it. It becomes a point of honour in the leaders of such parties, which is from thence communicated to their followers, to defend and support their respective peculiarities to the last; and, as a natural consequence, to shut their ears against all the pleas and remonstrances by which they are assailed. Even the wisest and best of men are seldom aware how much they are susceptible of this sort of influence; and while the offer of a world would be insufficient to engage them to recant a known truth, or to subscribe an acknowledged error, they are often retained in a willing captivity to prejudices and opinions which have no other support, and which, if they could lose sight of party feelings, they would almost instantly abandon.-REV. ROBERT HALL.

FASHION. While the world lasts, fashion will continue to lead it by the nose. And, after all, what can fashion do for its most obsequious followers? It can ring the changes upon the same things, and it can do no more. Whether our hats be white or black, our caps high or low, whether we wear two watches or one, is of little consequence. There is indeed an appearance of variety; but the folly and vanity that dictates and adopts the change are invariably the same. When the fashions of a particular period appear more reasonable than those of the preceding, it is not because the world is grown more reasonable than it was; but because, in a course of perpetual changes, some of them must sometimes happen to be for the better. Neither do I suppose the preposterous customs that prevail at present a proof of its greater folly. In a few years, perhaps next year, the fine gentleman will shut up his umbrella, and give it to his sister, filling his hand with a crab-tree cudgel instead of it: and when he has done so will he be wiser than now? By no means. The love of change will have betrayed him into a propriety which, in reality, he has no taste for, all his merit on the occasion amounting to no more than this -that, being weary of one plaything, he has taken up another.-COWPER.

GENIUS. I never knew a poet, except myself, who was punctual in anything, or to be depended on for the due discharge of any duty, except what he though the owed to the Muses. The moment a man takes it into his foolish head that he has what the world calls Genius, he gives himself a discharge from the servile drudgery of all friendly offices, and becomes good for nothing, except in the pursuit of his favourite employment.-COWPER.

NASEBY FIELD. The old hamlet of Naseby stands yet on its old hill top, very much as it did in Saxon days, on the north-western border of Northamptonshire, some seven or eight miles from Market-Harborough in Leicestershire, nearly on a line, and nearly mid-way, between that town and Daventry. A peaceable old hamlet, of perhaps five hundred souls; clay cottages for labourers, but neatly thatched and swept; smith's shop, sadler's shop, beer shop, all in order; forming a kind of square, which leads off, north and south, into two long streets: the old church, with its graves, stands in the centre, the truncated spire finishing itself with a strange old ball, held up by rods; a "hollow copper ball, which came from Boulogne in Henry the Eighth's time,”—which has, like Hudibras' breeches, "been at the siege of Bullen." The ground is upland, moorland, though now growing corn; was not enclosed till the last generation, and is still somewhat bare of wood. It stands nearly in the heart of England; gentle dulness, taking a turn at etymology, sometimes derives it from Navel; "Navesby, quasi Navelsby, from being," &c,

Avon Well, the distinct source of Shaks perc's Avon, is on the western slope of the high grounds; Nen and Welland streams leading towards Cromwell's Fen-Country, begin to gather themselves from boggy places on the eastern side. The grounds, as we say, lie high; and are still, in their new subdivisions, known by the name of "Hills," "Rutput Hill," "Mill Hill," "Dust Hill," and the like, precisely as in Rushworth's time; but they are not properly hills at all; they are broad, blunt, clayey masses, swelling towards and from each other, like indolent waves of a sea, sometimes of miles in extent.

It was on this high: moor-ground, in the centre of England, that King Charles, on the 14th of June, 1645, fought his last battle; dashed fiercely against the NewModel army, which he had despised till then; and saw himself shivered utterly to ruin thereby. "Prince Rupert, on the king's right wing, charged up the hill, and carried all before him ;" but Lieutenant-General Cromwell charged down-hill on the other wing, likewise carrying all before him, and did not gallop off the field to plunder, he. Cromwell, ordered thither by the Parliament, had arrived from the association two days before, "amid shouts from the whole army:" he had the ordering of the horse this morning. Prince Rupert, on returning from his plunder, finds the king's infantry a ruin; prepares to charge again with the rallied cavalry; but the cavalry too, when it came to the point, "broke all asunder,”- -never to reassemble more. The chase went through Harborough; where the king had already been that morning, when in an evil hour he turned back, to revenge some "surprise of an outpost at Naseby the night before," and gave the Roundheads battle.

The parliamentary army stood ranged on the height still partly called "Mill Hill,” as in Rushworth's time, a mile and a half from Naseby; the king's army on a parallel "Hill," its back to Harborough, with the wide table of upland now named Broad Moor between them; where indeed the main brunt of the action still clearly enough shows itself to have been. There are hollow spots, of a rank vegetation, scattered over that Broad Moor; which are understood to have once been burial mounds; some of which have been (with more or less of sacrilege) verified as such. A friend of mine has in his cabinet two ancient grinder-teeth, dug lately from that ground, and waits for an opportunity to re-bury them there. Sound effectual grinders, one of them very large, which ate their breakfast on the fourteenth of June two hundred years ago, and, except to be clenched once in grim battle, had never work to do more in this world !-THOMAS CARLYLE.

THE RABBLE, AND THE PEOPLE.-In the summer of 1754, Henry Fielding, the great author of 'Tom Jones,' left England, never to return, having been ordered by physicians to Lisbon for recovery of his broken health. He has written a most graphic journal of this voyage, full of striking pictures of our social condition ninety years ago. We select the account of his embarkation at Rotherhithe :

"To go on board the ship it was necessary first to go into a boat, a matter of no small difficulty, as I had no use of my limbs, and was to be carried by men who, though sufficiently strong for their burden, were, like Archimedes, puzzled to find a steady footing. Of this, as few of my readers have not gone into wherries on the Thames, they will easily be able to form to themselves an idea. However, by the assistance of my friend Mr. Welsh, whom I never think or speak of but with love and esteem, I conquered this difficulty, as I did afterwards that of ascending the ship, into which I was hoisted with more ease by a chair lifted with pulleys. I was soon seated in a great chair in the cabin, to refresh myself after a fatigue which had been more intolerable, in a quarter of a mile's passage from my coach to the ship, than I had before undergone in a land-journey of twelve miles, which I had travelled with the utmost expedition.

"This latter fatigue was, perhaps, somewhat heightened by an indignation which

I could not prevent arising in my mind. I think, upon my entrance into the boat, I presented a spectacle of the highest horror. The total loss of limbs was apparent to all who saw me, and my face contained marks of a most diseased state, if not of death itself. In this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it) through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed of paying their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behaviour; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts. It may be said that this barbarous custom is peculiar to the English, and of them only to the lowest degree; that it is an excrescence of an uncontrolled licentiousness mistaken for liberty, and never shows itself in men who are polished and refined in such a manner as human nature requires to produce that perfection of which it is susceptible, and to purge away that malevolence of disposition, of which, at our birth, we partake in common with the savage creation."

It is some satisfaction to contrast Fielding, insulted in his misery by the lowest of the rabble, with Scott, under circumstances equally calculated to call forth the sympathy of man for man. The great author of 'Waverley' was lying in hopeless illness at the St James's Hotel, in Jermyn Street, in the summer of 1832. That the affliction of the most popular writer of his age should call forth every sentiment of respect from the high and the refined, was of course to be expected; but it is well to know that the refinement had gone deeper into the native soil than those of Fielding's day might have thought probable. Mr. Lockhart, in his 'Life of Sir Walter Scott,' writes, "Allan Cunningham mentions that, walking home late one night, he found several working-men standing together at the corner of Jermyn Street, and one of them asked him, as if there was but one death-bed in London, 'Do you know, sir, if this is the street where he is lying?'"

171.-LUXURY OF THE ROMAN NOBLES.

AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS. [AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS lived in the fourth century, and wrote a history of the emperors, from the accession of Nerva to the death of Valens, A.D. 378. The earlier part of the history is lost. Gibbon, in the 31st chapter of his 'Decline and fall of the Roman Empire,' has translated with some freedom the passage which we now extract. He says, "Ammianus Marcellinus, who prudently chose the capital of the empire as the residence best adapted to the historian of his own times, has mixed with the narrative of public events a lively representation of the scenes with which he was familiarly conversant."]

The greatness of Rome was founded on the rare and almost incredible alliance of virtue and of fortune. The long period of her infancy was employed in a laborious struggle against the tribes of Italy, the neighbours and enemies of the rising city. In the strength and ardour of youth she sustained the storms of war, carried her victorious arms beyond the seas and the mountains, and brought home triumphant laurels from every country of the globe. At length, verging towards old age, and sometimes conquering by the terror only of her name, she sought the blessings of case and tranquillity. The venerable city which had trampled on the necks of the fiercest nations, and established a system of laws, the perpetual guardians of justice and freedom, was content, like a wise and wealthy parent, to devolve on the Cæsars, her favourite sons, the care of governing her ample patrimony. A secure and profound peace, such as had been once enjoyed in the reign of Numa, succeeded to the tumults of a republic; while Rome was still adored as the queen of the earth; and the subiect nations still reverenced the name of the people and the majesty of the

senate.

But this native splendour (continues Ammianus) is degraded and sullied by the conduct of some nobles, who, unmindful of their own dignity and of that of their country, assume an unbounded licence of vice and folly. They contend with each other in the empty vanity of titles and surnames; and curiously select or invent the most lofty and sonorous appellations, Reburrus or Fabunius, Pagonius or Tarrasius, which may impress the ears of the vulgar with astonishment and respect. From a vain ambition of perpetuating their memory, they affect to multiply their likeness in statues of bronze and marble; nor are they satisfied unless those statues are covered with plates of gold; an honourable distinction first granted to Acilius the consul, after he had subdued, by his arms and counsels, the power of King Antiochus. The ostentation of displaying, of magnifying, perhaps, the rent-roll of the estates which they possess in all the provinces, from the rising to the setting sun, provokes the just resentment of every man, who recollects, that their poor and invincible ancestors were not distinguished from the meanest of the soldiers, by the delicacy of their food or the splendour of their apparel. But the modern nobles measure their rank and consequence according to the loftiness of their chariots and the weighty magnificence of their dress. Their long robes of silk and purple float in the wind; and as they are agitated, by art or accident, they occasionally discover the under garments, the rich tunics, embroidered with the figures of various animals. Followed by a train of fifty servants, and tearing up the pavement, they move along the streets with the same impetuous speed as if they travelled with post-horses; and the example of the senators is boldly imitated by the matrons and ladies, whose covered carriages are continually driving round the immense space of the city and suburbs. Whenever these persons of high distinction condescend to visit the public baths, they assume, on their entrance, a tone of loud and insolent command, and appropriate to their own use the conveniences which were designed for the Roman people. If, in these places of mixed and general resort, they meet any of the infamous ministers of their pleasures, they express their affection by a tender embrace; while they proudly decline the salutations of their fellow-citizens, who are not permitted to aspire above the honour of kissing their hands or their knees. As soon as they have indulged themselves in the refreshment of the bath, they resume their rings, and the other ensigns of their dignity; select from their private wardrobe of the finest linen, such as might suffice for a dozen persons, the garments the most agreeable to their fancy, and maintain till their departure the same haughty demeanour, which perhaps might have been excused in the great Marcellus, after the conquest of Syracuse. Sometimes, indeed, these heroes undertake more arduous achievements; they visit their estates in Italy, and procure themselves, by the toil of servile hands, the amusements of the chase. If at any time, but more especially on a hot day, they have courage to sail, in their painted galleys, from the Lucrine lake to their elegant villas on the sea-const of Puteoli and Cayeta, they compare their own expeditions to the marches of Cæsar and Alexander. Yet, should a fly presume to settle on the silken folds of their gilded umbrellas, should a sunbeam penetrate through some unguarded and iraperceptible chink, they deplore their intolerable hardships, and lament, in affected language, that they were not born in the land of the Cimmerians, the regions of eternal darkness. In these journeys into the country, the whole body of the household marches with their master. In the same manner as the cavalry and infantry, the heavy and the light-armed troops, the advanced guard and the rear, are marshalled by the skill of their military leaders; so the domestic officers, who bear a rod as an ensign of authority, distribute and arrange the numerous train of slaves and attendants. The baggage and wardrobe move in the front, and are immediately followed by a multitude of cooks and inferior ministers, employed in the service of the

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