a law, so in turn every
law creates a crime; and hence we go on multiplying sins and evils, and
faults and blunders, till society becomes the organized disorder for
picking pockets.

THE REGENERATION OF A KNAVE.

A man who begins the world by being a fool often ends it by becoming
a knave; but he who begins as a knave, if he be a rich man (and so not
hanged), may end, my beloved pupils, in being a pious creature. And this
is the wherefore: "a knave early" soon gets knowledge of the world. One
vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors. But wisdom causes us to
love quiet, and in quiet we do not sin. He who is wise and sins not can
scarcely fail of doing good; for let him but utter a new truth, and even
his imagination cannot conceive the limit of the good he may have done
to man!

STYLE.

Do you well understand what a wonderful thing style is? I think not; for
in the exercises you sent me, your styles betrayed that no very earnest
consideration had been lavished upon them. Know, then, that you must
pause well before you take up any model of style. On your style often
depends your own character,--almost always the character given you by
the world. If you adopt the lofty style,--if you string together noble
phrases and swelling Sonora,--you have expressed, avowed, a frame of
mind which you will insensibly desire to act up to; the desire gradually
begets the capacity. The life of Dr. Parr is Dr. Parr's style put in
action; and Lord Byron makes himself through existence unhappy for
having accidentally slipped into a melancholy current of words. But
suppose you escape this calamity by a peculiar hardihood of temperament,
you escape not the stamp of popular opinion. Addison must ever be held
by the vulgar the most amiable of men, because of the social amenity of
his diction; and the admirers of language will always consider Burke a
nobler spirit than Fox, because of the grandeur of his sentences. How
many wise sayings have been called jests because they were wittily
uttered! How many nothings swelled their author into a sage, ay,
a saint, because they were strung together by the old hypocrite
nun,--Gravity!

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Tomlinsoniana, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOMLINSONIANA ***

***** This file should be named 7736.txt or 7736.zip *****
This and all ass