ed or malevolent voluntarily
to encounter. Good Heavens! what acerbity sours the blood of an author!
The manifestoes of opposing generals, advancing to pillage, to burn, to
destroy, contain not a tithe of the ferocity which animates the pages
of literary controversialists! No term of reproach is too severe, no
vituperation too excessive! the blackest passions, the bitterest, the
meanest malice, pour caustic and poison upon every page! It seems as if
the greatest talents, the most elaborate knowledge, only sprang from
the weakest and worst-regulated mind, as exotics from dung. The private
records, the public works of men of letters, teem with an immitigable
fury! Their histories might all be reduced into these sentences: they
were born; they quarrelled; they died!"

"But," said Clarence, "it would matter little to the world if
these quarrels were confined merely to poets and men of imaginative
literature, in whom irritability is perhaps almost necessarily allied to
the keen and quick susceptibilities which constitute their genius. These
are more to be lamented and wondered at among philosophers, theologians,
and men of science; the coolness, the patience, the benevolence, which
ought to characterize their works, should at least moderate their
jealousy and soften their disputes."

"Ah!" said Talbot, "but the vanity of discovery is no less acute than
that of creation: the self-love of a philosopher is no less self-love
than that of a poet. Besides, those sects the most sure of their
opinions, whether in religion or science, are always the most bigoted
and persecuting. Moreover, nearly all men deceive themselves in
disputes, and imagine that they are intolerant, not through private
jealousy, but public benevolence: they never declaim against the
injustice done to themselves; no, it is the terrible injury done
to society which grieves and inflames them. It is not the bitter
expressions against their dogmas which give them pain; by no means:
it is the atrocious doctrines (so prejudicial to the country, if in
polities; so pernicious to the world, if in philosophy), which their
duty, not their vanity, induces them to denounce and anathematize."

"There seems," said Clarence, "to be a sort of reaction in sophistry and
hypocrisy: there has, perhaps, never been a deceiver who was not, by his
own passions, himself the deceived."

"Very true," said Talbot; "and it is a pity that historians have not
kept that fact in view: we sho