[ 652 ] [JUNE, 



APHORISMS ON MAN, BY THK LATK WILLIAM HAZLITT. 



[C&ntinued from last Month.'] 



LXVII. 



The error of Mandeville, as well as of those opposed to him, is in 

 concluding that man is a simple and not a compound being. The 

 schoolmen and divines endeavour to prove that the gross and material 

 part of his nature is a foreign admixture, distinct from and unworthy of 

 the man himself. The misanthropes and sceptics, on the other hand, 

 maintain the falsity of all human virtues, and that all that is not sensual 

 and selfish is a mere theatrical deception. But in order that man should 

 be a wholly and incorrigibly selfish being, he should be shut up like 

 an oyster in its shell, without any possible conception of what passes 

 beyond the wall of his senses ; and the feelers of his mind should not 

 extend their ramifications under any circumstances or in any manner, 

 to the thoughts and sentiments of others. Shakspeare has expressed 

 the matter better than the pedants on either side, who wish unreason- 

 ably to exalt or degrade human nature. " The web of our lives is as 

 of a mingled yarn, good and ill together : our virtues would be proud, 

 if our faults whipped them not, and our vices would despair, if they 

 were not cherished by our virtues." 



LXVIII. 



People cry out against the preposterous absurdity of such representa- 

 tions as the German inventions of the Devil's Elixir and the Bottle Imp. 

 Is it then a fiction that we see ? Or is it not rather a palpable reality 

 that takes place every day and hour ? Who is there that is not haunted 

 by some heated phantom of his brain, some wizard spell, that clings 

 to him in spite of his will, and hurries him on to absurdity or ruin ? 

 There is no machinery or phantasmagoria of a melo-drame more extra- 

 vagant than the workings of the passions. Mr. Farley may do his worst 

 with scaly forms, with flames, and dragon's wings : but after all, the 

 true demon is within us. How many, whose senses are shocked at the 

 outward spectacle, and who turn away startled or disgusted might say, 

 pointing to their bosoms, " The moral is here !" 



LXIX. 



Mr. L asked Sir Thomas who had been intimate with the 



Prince, if it was true that he was so fine a gentleman as he was 



generally represented ? Sir Thomas made answer, that it was 



certainly true that the Prince was a very fine gentleman indeed: 

 " but," added he, " if I am to speak my mind, the finest gentleman 

 I ever saw, was Sadi Baba, the ambassador to Constantinople, from the 

 Usbek Tartars." 



LXX. 



" Man is in no haste to be venerable/' At present, it seems as if 

 there were no occasion to become so. People die as usual ; but it is not 

 the fashion to grow old. Formerly, men subsided and settled down 

 into a respectable old age at forty, as they did into a bob-wig, and a brown 

 coat and waistcoat of a certain cut. The father of a family no longer 

 pretended to pass for a gay young fellow, after he had children grown 

 up ; and women dwindled, by regular and willing gradations, into 

 mothers and grandmothers, transferring their charms and pretensions to 

 a blooming posterity ; but these things are never thought of now-a-days. 

 A matron of sixty flaunts it in (t La Belle Assembler's dresses for May :" 

 and certainly M. Stultz never inquires into the grand climacteric of his 

 customers. Dress levels all ages as well as all ranks. 



