James’s multitudinous novels seem to be written upon the plan of “the songs of the Bard of Schiraz,” in which, we are assured by Fadladeen, “the same beautiful thought occurs again and again in every possible variety of phrase.”
Some of our foreign lions resemble the human brain in one very striking particular. They are without any sense themselves and yet are the centres of sensation.
Mirabeau, I fancy, acquired his wonderful tact at foreseeing and meeting _contingencies_, during his residence in the stronghold of _If_.
Cottle’s “Reminiscences of Coleridge” is just such a book as damns its perpetrator forever in the opinion of every gentleman who reads it. More and more every day do we moderns _pavoneggiarsi_ about our Christianity; yet, so far as the _spirit_ of Christianity is concerned, we are immeasurably behind the ancients. Mottoes and proverbs are the indices of national character; and the Anglo-Saxons are disgraced in having no proverbial equivalent to the “_De mortuis nil nisi bonum._” Moreover—where, in all statutory Christendom, shall we find a _law_ so Christian as the “_Defuncti injuriâ ne afficiantur_” of the Twelve Tables?
The simple _negative_ injunction of the Latin law and proverb—the injunction _not to do ill_ to the dead—seems at a first glance, scarcely susceptible of improvement in the delicate respect of its terms. I cannot help thinking, however, that the sentiment, if not the idea intended, is more forcibly conveyed in an apophthegm by one of the old English moralists, James Puckle. By an ingenious figure of speech he contrives to imbue the negation of the Roman command with a spirit of active and positive beneficence. “When speaking of the dead,” he says, in his “Grey Cap for a Green Head,” “_so fold up your discourse that their virtues may be outwardly shown, while their vices are wrapped up in silence_.”
I have no doubt that the Fourierites honestly fancy “a nasty poet fit for nothing” to be the true translation of “_poeta nascitur non fit_.”
There surely can_not_ be “more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of” (oh, Andrew Jackson Davis!) “in _your_ philosophy.”
“It is only as the Bird of Paradise quits us in taking wing,” observes, or should observe, some poet, “that we obtain a full view of the beauty of its plumage;” and it is only as the politician is about being “turned out” that—like the snake of the Irish Chronicle when touched by St. Patrick—he “awakens to a sense of his _situation_.”