es the humbug in
religion, the humbug in politics, the humbug in love, the humbug in the
plausibilities of the world; but you may cry, my dear pupils, when he
derides what is often the safest of all practically to deride,--the
humbug in common honesty! Men are honest from religion, wisdom,
prejudice, habit, fear, and stupidity; but the few only are wise; and
the persons we speak of deride religion, are beyond prejudice, unawed by
habit, too indifferent for fear, and too experienced for stupidity.

POPULAR WRATH AT INDIVIDUAL IMPRUDENCE.

You must know, my dear young friends, that while the appearance of
magnanimity is very becoming to you, and so forth, it will get you
a great deal of ill-will if you attempt to practise it to your own
detriment. Your neighbours are so invariably, though perhaps insensibly,
actuated by self-interest--self-interest--[Mr. Tomlinson is wrong
here; but his ethics were too much narrowed to Utilitarian
principles.--EDITOR.]--is so entirely, though every twaddler denies
it, the axis of the moral world--that they fly into a rage with him who
seems to disregard it. When a man ruins himself, just hear the abuse he
receives; his neighbours take it as a personal affront!

DUM DEFLUAT AMNIS.

One main reason why men who have been great are disappointed, when
they retire to private life, is this: Memory makes a chief source of
enjoyment to those who cease eagerly to hope; but the memory of the
great recalls only that public life which has disgusted them. Their
private life hath slipped insensibly away, leaving faint traces of the
sorrow or the joy which found them too busy to heed the simple and quiet
impressions of mere domestic vicissitude.

SELF-GLORIFIERS.

Providence seems to have done to a certain set of persons--who always
view their own things through a magnifying medium, deem their house
the best in the world, their gun the truest, their very pointer a
miracle--as Colonel Hanger suggested to economists to do; namely,
provide their servants each with a pair of large spectacles, so that a
lark might appear as big as a fowl, and a twopenny loaf as large as a
quartern.

THOUGHT ON FORTUNE.

It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like
the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an
additional lace upon his liveries.