58 THE EYE, THE EAR, AND THE HAND, 



for his state and his diadems ! Cast aside that 

 sceptre, it is a bauble ; doff that crown, it is no- 

 thing ; rend away the velvet and the tinsel, they are 

 trash ; remove that coverlid of satin, it is a burden : 

 give him the fresh air of heaven the first draught 

 of nature that he drew so that the king may die 

 easily and in peace ; free the monarch of all the 

 trappings of his grandeur so that the spirit of the 

 man may mount in triumph to its God. 



Our other organs of observation, the eye, the 

 ear, and the hand, though in the last case we 

 make the hand a tyrant, by appropriating in lan- 

 guage to it a faculty which really belongs to the 

 whole fibrous or muscular part of our frame, 

 admit of more improvement by cultivation ; and 

 their improvement by cultivation is like that of all 

 other natural things plant them in the right soil, 

 and keep them from weeds, and they will grow of 

 themselves. We cannot analyse the process of 

 tasting so as to find any thing intermediate be- 

 tween the sapid food and the sapent palate ; and 

 though we know that scent is wafted to a distance 

 through the air, while taste is not, we can dis- 

 cover no medium between the delighting flower 

 and the delighted organ. In the one of those 

 cases, therefore, there is probably nothing that 

 we can discover so as to improve it, and in the 

 other there is nothing which we do discover. All 

 that we know of these two senses is, that their 

 acuteness of perception is always in proportion to 

 the wholesomeness of the state of the body ; and 

 therefore, study them as we will, we can derive 

 from them only one lesson, and that, too, merely 

 a surface lesson a lesson as palpable to the man 

 who knows not a letter as to him who is most 



