Burnet, in the history of his own times, giving Lord Sunderland’s character, says,
His own notions were always good; but he was a man of great expence.
I have seen a woman’s face break out in heats, as she has been talking against a great lord, whom she had never seen in her life; and indeed never knew a party-woman that kept her beauty for a twelvemonth.
I single him out among the moderns, because he had the foolish presumption to censure Tacitus, and to write history himself: and your Lordship will forgive this short excursion in honour of a favourite author.
It seems to me, that in order to maintain the moral system of the world at a certain point, far below that of ideal perfection, (for we are made capable of conceiving what we are incapable of attaining), but however sufficient upon the whole to constitute a state easy and happy, or at the worst tolerable: I say, it seems to me, that the author of nature has thought fit to mingle from time to time, among the societies of men, a few, and but a few, of those on whom he is graciously pleased to bestow a larger proportion of the ethereal spirit than is given in the ordinary course of his providence to the sons of men.
_Bolingbroke, on the spirit of patriotism, let. 1._
To crowd into a single member of a period, different subjects, is still worse than to crowd them into one period.
---- Trojam, genitore Adamasto Paupere (mansissetque utinam fortuna) profectus. _Æneid. iii. 614._
Where two things are so connected as to require but a copulative, it is pleasant to find a resemblance in the members of the period, were it even so slight as where both begin with the same letter:
The peacock, in all his pride, does not display half the colour that appears in the garments of a British lady, when she is either dressed for a ball or a birth-day.
Had not my dog of a steward run away as he did, without making up his accounts, I had still been immersed in sin and sea-coal.
My life’s companion, and my bosom-friend, One faith, one fame, one fate shall both attend. _Dryden, Translation of Æneid._
There is obviously a sensible defect in neatness when uniformity is in this case totally neglected[84]; witness the following example, where the construction of two members connected by a copulative is unnecessarily varied.
