Hardly do we guess aright at things that are upon earth, and with labour do we find the things that are before us but the things that are in heaven who hath searched out? Wisdom of Solomon, ix. 16. Ωναξ δυ τὸ μαντειόν ἐστι τὸ ἐν Δελφοῖς οὔτε λέγει οὔτε κρύπτει ἀλλὰ σημαίνει. Heraclitus ap. Plutarch. de Pyth, orac. p. 404. Vasta ut plurimum solent esse quæ inania: solida contrahuntur maxime, et in parvo sita sunt. تا GUESSES AT TRUTH. It may seem inconsistent with some foregoing observations, to quarrel with a jest; nor would I, so long as it pretends not to be something else. But wit will not keep; jokes to be good ought to be fresh; the airy particles which give them flavour, evaporate as they pass from mouth to mouth, and they grow so stale and vapid and mawkish that every man of taste nauseates them. Hence, to continue current, they must have a nominal as well as a real value: they must appear at least to be more than mere jests; they must represent some truth, or mimic it. In this manner what was originally perhaps thrown off in harmless gaiety, being repeated as a proverb and retailed as a maxim, may become mischievous; inasmuch as Wit, which delights in heightening and deepening all contrasts, is nearly allied to that sophistry which thrives by perplexing and confounding all relations and after a saying has thus been abused, one is loth to sully one's lips with it. Of such a kind is that vulgarest of street-walking vulgarisms, that smart, pert, tawdry, trickish cheat: Why should I do anything for Posterity? Posterity has done nothing for me. The sophistry here is so shallow, one should be unwilling to expose it, did not continual experience teach us that the shallows cause many more wrecks than the depths. People may grumble about dark and deep mysteries; it is not among them that men make shipwreck of their souls; it is on some jagged rock or flat sandbank near the shore. The saying I have |