ain, bearing the
proposition along with it. But the success hath not hitherto been
answerable, partly by some error in the quantum or composition, and
partly by the perverseness of lads, to whom this bolus is so nauseous
that they generally steal aside, and discharge it upward before it can
operate; neither have they been yet persuaded to use so long an
abstinence as the prescription requires.

In the school of political projectors I was but ill entertained, the
professors appearing in my judgment wholly out of their senses, which
is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy
people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose
favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of
teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit,
great abilities, and eminent services; of instructing princes to know
their true interest, by placing it on the same foundation with that
of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to
exercise them; with many other wild impossible chimeras that never
entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me
the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and
irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.

II

ON THE HOSPITALITY OF THE VULGAR[111]

Those inferior duties of life which the French call _les petites
morales_, or the smaller morals, are with us distinguished by the name
of good manners or breeding. This I look upon, in the general notion
of it, to be a sort of artificial good sense, adapted to the meanest
capacities, and introduced to make mankind easy in their commerce with
each other. Low and little understandings, without some rules of this
kind, would be perpetually wandering into a thousand indecencies and
irregularities in behavior; and in their ordinary conversation, fall
into the same boisterous familiarities that one observeth amongst them
when a debauch hath quite taken away the use of their reason. In other
instances, it is odd to consider, that for want of common discretion,
the very end of good breeding is wholly perverted; and civility,
intended to make us easy, is employed in laying chains and fetters
upon us, in debarring us of our wishes, and in crossing our most
reasonable desires and inclinations.

This abuse reigneth chiefly in the country, as I found to my vexation,
when I was last there, in a visit I made to a neighbor about two m