122 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF A FUTURE STATE. 



intense and anxious expectations, had worn him 

 out. An irritating fever, a dry cough, and ex 

 cessive thirst consumed him. During the re 

 mainder of the night he made vain attempts to 

 quench the burning thirst that consumed him.&quot; 



What man that ever enjoyed the pleasures of 

 tranquillity, would envy such a state of mind as 

 that which has now been described, although the 

 individual were surrounded with every earthly 

 glory ? Such mad ambition as that which raged 

 in the breast of this singular personage, must be 

 a perpetual torment to its possessor, in whatever 

 region of the universe he exists, and must pro 

 duce baleful effects on every one within the 

 sphere of its influence. The coolness with 

 which such characters calculate on the destruc 

 tion of human life, and the miseries which their 

 lawless passions produce on their fellow-crea 

 tures, appears in the following extract. 



&quot; He asked Rapp, if he thought we should 

 gain the victory ? No doubt, was the reply, 

 but it will be sanguinary. I know it, re 

 sumed Napoleon, but I have 80,000 men ; I 

 shall lose 20,000 ; I shall enter Moscow w ith 

 60,000 ; the stragglers will then rejoin us, and 

 afterwards the battalions on the march ; and we 

 shall be stronger than we were before the bat 

 tle. 



The other personage to whom I alluded is 

 Lord Byron. 



The following sketches of his character are 

 taken from &quot; Recollections of the life of Lord 

 Byron, from the year 1808 to the year 1818. 

 Taken from authentic documents, &c. by R. C. 

 Dallas, Esq.&quot; 



14 He reduced his palate,&quot; says Mr. Dallas, 

 11 to a diet the most simple and abstemious but 

 the passions of his heart were too mighty ; nor 

 did it ever enter his mind to overcome them. Re 

 sentment, anger, and hatred, held full sway over 

 him ; and his greatest gratification at that time, 

 was in overcharging his pen with gall, which 

 flowed in every direction, against individuals, 

 his country, the world, the universe, creation, 

 and the Creator. Misanthropy, disgust of life, 

 leading to skepticism and impiety, prevailed in 

 his heart, and imbittered his existence. Unac 

 customed to female society, he at once dreaded 

 and abhorred it. As for domestic happiness he 

 had no idea of it. A large family, he said, 

 appeared like opposite ingredients, mixed per 

 force in the same salad, and I never relished the 

 Composition. He was so completely disgusted 

 with his relations, especially the female part of 

 them, that he completely avoided them. I con 

 sider, 1 said he, collaterial ties as the work of 

 prejudice, and not the bond of the heart, which 

 must choose for itself unshackled. In corre 

 spondence with suchdispositions and sentiments, 

 &quot; he talked of his relation to the Earl of Carlisle 

 with indignation.&quot; Having received from him 

 a frigid letter, &quot; he determined to lash his rela 



tion with all the gall he could throw into satire.* 

 He declaimed against the ties of consan 

 guinity, and abjured even the society of his 

 sister, from which he entirely withdrew him 

 self, until after the publication of &quot; Cliilde Ha 

 rold,&quot; when at length he yielded to my persua 

 sions, and made advances to a fiiendly corre 

 spondence.&quot; 



Here we have a picture of an individual, in 

 whom &quot; resentment, anger, and hatred,&quot; reign 

 ed without control : who could vent his rage 

 even against the Creator, and the universe he 

 had formed, who hated his fellow-creatures, and 

 even his own existence ; who spurned at the 

 ties of relationship, and &quot; abjured even the so 

 ciety of his sister.&quot; What horrible mischiefs 

 and miseries would a character of this descrip 

 tion produce, were such malevolent passions to 

 rage with unbounded violence, without being 

 checked by those restraints, which human laws 

 impose in the present state ! 



I shall state only another example of this 

 description, taken from Captain Cochrane s 

 &quot; Travels in Russia.&quot; On arriving at the 

 Prussian frontiers, says the captain, &quot; My 

 passport demanded, myself interrogated by a 

 set of whiskered ruffians, obliged to move from 

 one guard to another, the object of sarcasm and 

 official tyranny, I wanted no inducement, fa 

 tigued as I was, to proceed on my journey, but 

 even this was not permitted me. A large public 

 room, full of military rubbish, and two long 

 benches serving as chairs, to an equally long 

 table, were the place and furniture allotted me. 

 I asked the landlord fur supper; he laughed at 

 me ; and to my demand of a bed, grinningly 

 pointed to the floor, and refused me even a por 

 tion of the straw which had been brought in for 

 the soldiers. Of all the demons that ever existed, 

 or have been imagined in human shape, I thought 

 the landlord of the inn the blackest. The figure 

 of Gil Peres occurred to me, but it sunk in tha 

 comparison with the wretch then before me for 

 ill nature, malignity, and personal hideousness. 

 His face half covered with a black beard, and 

 large bristly whiskers, his stature below the 

 common, his head sunk between his shoulders 

 to make room for the protuberance of his back ; 

 his eyes buried in the ragged locks of his lank 

 grisly hair; added to this a club foot, and a 

 voice which, on every attempt to speak, was 

 like the shrieking of a screech-owl, and you 

 have some faint idea of this mockery of a 

 man.&quot; Here, we have presented to view a 

 human being, who, in the malignity of his mind, 

 and in the conformation of his body, bears a cer 

 tain resemblance to those wretched beings in 

 whose ore&quot; *-&amp;lt;? benevolence never glows, and in 

 whose dwellings nothing is seen but the most 

 haggard and deformed objects, and nothing heard 

 but horrid imprecations, and the sounds of wo. 



Let us now suppose, for a moment, a vas* 



