FATHERS AND ELDER SONS AMONG THE GREAT.

And let us, my brethren who have not our names in the Red Book, console ourselves by thinking comfortably how miserable our betters may be, and that Damocles, who sits on satin cushions, and is served on gold plate, has an awful sword hanging over his head in the shape of a bailiff, or an hereditary disease, or a family secret, which peeps out every now and then from the embroidered arras in a ghastly manner, and will be sure to drop one day or the other in the right place.

In comparing, too, the poor man's situation with that of the great, there is (according to Mr. Eaves) another source of comfort for the former. You who have little or no patrimony to bequeath or to inherit, may be on good terms with your father or your son, whereas the heir of a great prince, such as my Lord Steyne, must naturally be angry at being kept out of his kingdom, and eye the occupant of it with no very agreeable glances. "Take it as a rule," this sardonic old Eaves would say, "the fathers and elder sons of all great families hate each other. The Crown Prince is always in opposition to the crown or hankering after it. Shakspeare knew the world, my good sir, and when he describes Prince Hal (from whose family the Gaunts pretend to be descended, though they are no more related to John of Gaunt than you are,) trying on his father's coronet, he gives you a natural description of all heirs-apparent. If you were heir to a dukedom and a thousand pounds a day, do you mean to say you would not wish for possession? Pooh! And it stands to reason that every great man having experienced this feeling towards his father, must be aware that his son entertains it towards himself; and so they can't but be suspicious and hostile.

"Then again, as to the feeling of elder towards younger sons. My dear sir, you ought to know that every elder brother looks upon the cadets of the house as his natural enemies, who deprive him of so much

ready money which ought to be his by right. I have often heard George Mac Turk, Lord Bajazet's eldest son, say that, if he had his will, when he came to the title, he would do what the sultans do, and clear the estate by chopping off all his younger brothers' heads at once; and so the case is, more or less, with them all. I tell you they are all Turks in their hearts. Pooh! sir, they know the world." And here, haply a great man coming up, Tom Eaves's hat would drop off his head, and he would rush forward with a bow and a grin, which showed that he knew the world too-in the Tomeavesian way, that is. And having laid out every shilling of his fortune on an annuity, Tom could afford to bear no malice to his nephews and nieces, and to have no other feeling with regard to his betters but a constant and generous desire to dine with them.

Thackeray.

SUPERIOR MORALITY OF CHRISTIAN COUNTRIES. (Alciphron here argues for, and Crito against Atheism.)

Alciphron.-Would you have us think ourselves a finer people than the ancient Greeks or Romans?

Crito.-If by finer you mean better, perhaps we are; and if we are not, it is not owing to the Christian religion, but to the want of it.

Alciphron.-You say "perhaps we are:" I do not pique myself upon my reading, but should be very ignorant to be capable of being imposed on in so plain a point. What! compare Cicero or Brutus to an English patriot, or Seneca to one of our parsons! Then that invincible constancy and vigour of mind, that disinterested and noble virtue, that adorable public spirit you so much admire, are things in them so well known, and so different from our manners, that I know not how to excuse your perhaps. Euphranor, indeed, who passeth his life in this obscure corner, may possibly mistake the characters of our times, but you who know the world, how could you be guilty of such a mistake?

1

Crito. O Alciphron, I would by no means detract from the noble virtue of ancient heroes; but I observe those great men were not the minute philosophers 1 of their times; that the best principles upon which they acted are common to them with Christians, of whom it would be no difficult matter to assign many instances in every kind of worth and virtue, public or private, equal to the most celebrated of the ancients, though, perhaps, their story might not have been so well told, set off with such fine lights and colourings of style, or so vulgarly known and considered by every schoolboy. But though it should be granted, that here and there a Greek or Roman genius, bred up under strict laws and severe discipline, animated to public virtue by statues, crowns, triumphal arches, and such rewards and monuments of great actions, might attain to a character and fame beyond other men, yet this will prove only, that they had more spirit, and lived under a civil polity more wisely ordered in certain points than ours; which advantages of nature and civil institution will be no argument for their religion or against ours. On the contrary, it seems an invincible proof of the power and excellency of the Christian religion, that without the help of those civil institutions and incentives to glory, it should be able to inspire a phlegmatic people with the noblest sentiments, and soften the rugged manners of northern boors into gentleness and humanity; and that these good qualities should become national, and rise and fall in proportion to the purity of our religion, as it approaches to, or recedes from, the plan laid down in the gospel. To make a right judgment of the effects of the Christian religion, let us take a survey of the prevailing notions and manners of this very country where we live, and compare them with those of our heathen predecessors.

Alciphron. I have heard much of the glorious light of the gospel, and should be glad to see some effects

1 Minute Philosopher was a name given at that time to an Atheist or Freethinker.

of it in my own dear country, which, by-the-by, is one of the most corrupt and profligate upon earth, notwithstanding the boasted purity of our religion. But it would look mean and diffident to affect a comparison with the barbarous heathen from whence we drew our original: if you would do honour to your religion, dare to make it with the most renowned heathens of antiquity. Crito. It is a common prejudice to despise the present, and overrate remote times and things. Something of this seems to enter into the judgments men make of the Greeks and Romans. For though it must be allowed those nations produced some noble spirits and great patterns of virtue, yet upon the whole it seems to me they were much inferior in point of real virtue and good morals, even to this corrupt and profligate nation, as you are now pleased to call it, in dishonour to our religion, however you may think fit to characterize it, when you would do honour to the minute philosophy. This, I think, will be plain to any one, who shall turn off his eyes from a few shining characters, to view the general manners and customs of those people. Their insolent treatment of captives, even of the highest rank and softer sex, their unnatural exposing of their own children, their bloody gladiatorian spectacles, compared with the common notions of Englishmen, are to me a plain proof, that our minds are much softened by Christianity. Could anything be more unjust, than the condemning a young lady to the most infamous punishment and death for the guilt of her father, or a whole family of slaves, perhaps some hundreds, for a crime committed by one? Or more abominable than their bacchanals and unbridled lusts of every kind? which, notwithstanding all that has been done by minute philosophers to debauch the nation, and their successful attempts on some parts of it, have not yet been matched among us, at least not in every circumstance of impudence and effrontery. While the Romans were poor, they were temperate; but, as they grew rich, they became luxurious to a degree that is hardly believed or conceived by us. It cannot be

denied, the old Roman spirit was a great one. But it is as certain, there have been numberless examples of the most resolute and clear courage in Britons, and in general from a religious cause. Upon the whole, it seems an instance of the greatest blindness and ingratitude, that we do not see and own the exceeding great benefits of Christianity, which, to omit higher considerations, hath so visibly softened, polished, and embellished our manners.

Berkeley.

CONSIDERATIONS OF THE VANITY AND SHORTNESS OF MAN'S LIFE.

All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every man, and to every creature, doth preach our funeral sermon, and calls us to look and see how the old sexton, Time, throws up the earth, and digs a grave, where we must lay our sins or our sorrows, and sow our bodies, till they rise again in a fair or an intolerable eternity. Every revolution which the sun makes about the world divides between life and death, and death possesses both those portions by the next morrow; and we are dead to all those months which we have already lived, and we shall never live them over again, and still God makes little periods of our age. First we change our world, when we enter life and feel the warmth of the sun; then we sleep and enter into the image of death, in which state we are unconcerned in all the changes of the world; and if our mothers or our nurses die, or a wild boar destroy our vineyards, or our king be sick, we regard it not, but, during that state, are as disinterested as if our eyes were closed with the clay that weeps in the bowels of the earth. At the end of seven years our teeth fall and die before us, representing a formal prologue to