1831.] [ 485 ] 



APHORISMS ON MAN, BY THE LATE WILLIAM HAZLTTT. 



[ Continued from last Month.] 



LVI. 



The greatest proof of pride is its being able to extinguish envy and 

 jealousy. Vanity produces the latter effect on the continent. 



LVII. 



When you speak of the popular effect and enthusiasm produced by 

 the ceremonies of the Catholic church, it is presently objected that all 

 this faith and zeal is excited by mummery and superstition. I am ready 

 to allow that ; and when I find that truth and reason have the same 

 homage and reverence paid to them as absurdity and falsehood, I shall 

 think all the advantages are clearly on the side of the former. The 

 processes of reason do not commonly afford the elements of passion as 

 their result ; and the object of strong and even lofty feeling seems to 

 appeal rather to the grossness and incongruity of the senses and imagi- 

 nation, than to the clear and dry deductions of the understanding. Man 

 has been truly defined a religious animal ; but his faith and heaven- 

 ward aspirations cease if you reduce him to a mere mathematical machine. 

 The glory and the power of the true religion are in its enlisting the 

 affections of man along with the understanding. 



LVIII. 



We are imposed upon by the affectation of grace and gentility only 

 till we see the reality ; and then we laugh at the counterfeit, and are 

 surprised that we did not see through it before. 



LIX. 



English women, even of the highest rank, look like dowdies in Paris ; 

 or exactly as country-women do in London. It is a rule-of-three pro* 

 portion. A French milliner or servant maid laughs (not without reason) 

 at an English Duchess. The more our fair countrywomen dress a la Fran- 

 qaise, the more unlucky they seem ; and the more foreign graces they 

 give themselves, the more awkward they grow. They want the tournure 

 Franqoise. Oh ! how we have " melted, thawed, and dissolved into a 

 dew/' to see a bustling, red-faced, bare-necked English Duchess, or 

 banker's wife, come into a box at the French theatre, bedizened and 

 bedaubed ! My Lady-mayoress or the Right Honourable the Countess 



Dowager of , before she ventures on the word vulgar, or scorns her 



untitled and untutored neighbours as beneath her notice, should go to 

 see les Angloises pour rise I That is the looking-glass for upstart wealth 

 and inflated aristocracy. 



LX. 



The advantage of our nobility over the plebeian classes is said to be 

 in the blood and in the breed the Norman breed, we suppose the 

 high noses and arched eyebrows date from the Conquest. We plead 

 guilty to the insinuation conveyed in the expression " the coronet face" 

 and bow with some sort of pride to the pride of birth. But this 

 hypothesis is hardly compatible with the evident improvement in the 

 present generation of noblemen and gentlemen by the intermarriages 



