the laws made for individual cases; and thus in
old States, though the world is still agreed that private swindling is
private swindling, there is the Devil's own difficulty in punishing the
swindling of the public. The art of swindling now is a different thing
to the art of swindling a hundred years ago; but the laws remain the
same. Adaptation in private cases is innovation in public; so, without
repealing old laws, they make new. Sometimes these are effectual, but
more often not. Now, my beloved pupils, a law is a gun which if it
misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty,
it hits some one else. As every crime creates 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 amiab