I.] OBSERVATIONS. 



that the orator was fit for little besides being 

 knocked on the head. 



2: When learned gentlemen, and learned lords, 

 and girl-bewitching novel-writers, make this kind 

 of ignorance their boast, is it any wonder that it 

 shonld become the fashion, with persons in the 

 middle rank of life, to make it their boast, that they 

 do not know what you mean, when you talk of 

 such things as spades and ploughs, and rakes and 

 harrows? It is curious, too, that these same per- 

 sons are ashamed to be thought ignorant of the 

 histories of all the nations on earth ; and, as to 

 '^politics," they all understand politics; they 

 would be ashamed not to be thought clearly to 

 understand that which the King and tJie Parlia- 

 ment ought to do. The constitution ! Oh ! they 

 all understand that, though made up of a series 

 of maxims, decisions, and positive acts, grown 

 together in the course of tv/elve hundred years. 

 And, religion, now 1 what man of them would not 

 be ashamed, not to be thought competent to de- 

 cide, not only between Calvin and the Pope; but 

 to determine, to a hair's breadth, the right and the 

 wrong of all the intervening classes, amounting 

 to about fifty in number, each differing in its creed 

 from all the other forty-nine ? 



3. Mr. TuLL, in the elegant passage v/hich I 

 have taken for my motto, observes on the waste 

 of learning, in measuring and weighing the stars ; 

 b2 



