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Perceval. I do not go so far as to call him, what | Nay, I am ready to believe that Draco himself did some do, heavenly and godlike.

Romilly. I do.

Perceval. How! you?

not punish so many with blood as we do, although he punished with blood every one indiscriminately. Perceval. You can adduce no proof, or rather no support, of this paradox.

Romilly. A logician will accept many things which a lawyer would reject, and a moralist will attend to some which would be discountenanced by the logician. Let me remark to you that we punish with death certain offences which Draco did not even note as crimes, and many others had not yet sprung up in society. On the former position I need not expatiate; on the latter let me recall to your memory the vast number of laws on various kinds of forgery; and having brought them before

Romilly. Yes: men who have much to give are very like God; and the more so when the sun of their bounty shines on the unworthy no less than on the worthy. However he was eloquent, if facility in speaking is eloquence. When we were together in the law-courts, it was reasonable enough to consider our tongues as the most valuable parts of us, knowing that their motion or quiescence would be purchased by dignities and emoluments; but the present times require men of business, men of firmness, men of consistency, men of probity; and what is first-rate at the bar is but second-you, let me particularly direct your attention to rate on the council-board.

Perceval. I should be glad of your assistance, our opinions being in general alike.

Romilly. We could not take the same side on civil and criminal causes, neither can we, for the same reason, in the House of Commons. Whichever may win, we will both lead, if you please.

Perceval. I understand you, and cannot but commend your determination. Yet, my dear Romilly, although there have been many Whig oppositions, there never has been and (in the present state of things) never will be a Whig ministry. The post regulates the principles.

Romilly. A ministry of such virtue as to carry Whig principles into the cabinet, I fear there never will be, however much I wish it. Yet on certain points disconnected from party, there is no reason why we two should disagree: I will support you in your favourite plan.

that severe one on fraudulent bankruptcy.

Perceval. Severe one! there at least we differ. If any crime deserves the punishment of death, surely this does. Is it not enough that a creditor loses the greater part perhaps of his property, by the misfortune or imprudence of another, without losing the last farthing of it by the same man's dishonesty?

Romilly. Enough it is, and more than enough: but lines of distinction are drawn on murder, and even on the wilful and malicious.

Perceval. There indeed they may be drawn correctly. Malice may arise from injury, more or less grievous, more or less recent; revenge may be delayed and meditated a longer time or a shorter, and may be perpetrated with more or less atrocity; but rarely is it brought to maturity in the coolness of judgment. The fraud under consideration not only is afore-thought; it is formed and grounded upon calculation. You remember a trial at WarRomilly. To soften the rigour of the penal sta-wick, or rather the report of it, the result of which tutes.

Perceval. What is that?

Perceval. I once thought it necessary, or at least advisable. My colleagues oppose it, feeling that, if reform is introduced, it may reach at last the Court of Chancery, and tend to diminish the dignity of the first office under the crown.

Romilly. In England there is no dignity but what is constituted by possessions. If you would propose a grant of fifty or sixty thousand pounds a-year to the present chancellor, to indemnify him for the losses he would sustain by regulating his court, I am convinced he would not oppose you.

Perceval. The people are turbulent, and might dislike the grant, reasonable as it must appear to any unprejudiced man. But the principal objection is, that an inquiry would exhibit to the world such a mass of what we have been lately taught to call abuses, as must greatly tend to alienate the affections of the people from the institutions of their country.

Romilly. Fees are ticklish things to meddle with, forms are venerable, and silk gowns are nonconductors of inquiry into courts of chancery. I confine myself to the criminal statutes; and would diminish the number of capital offences, which is greater in England, I imagine, than the light and heavy put together in the tables of Solon or Numa.

was, that a sergeant-major, an elderly man, of irreproachable character antecedently, as was proved by the testimony of his superior officer who had known him for twenty years, was condemned to be hanged (and not by Buller) for stabbing a young reprobate who had insulted and struck him. It was proved that he ran up-stairs for his sword, in order to commit the crime. This hardly was afore-thought, and certainly was uncalculated.

Romilly. It is probable that if he had run downstairs, instead of up-stairs, his life would not have been forfeited; or even if his counsel had proved that the mounting of the stairs could have been performed in five steps, as I am inclined to think it might by an outraged man. But it appeared to the judge, on the evidence before him, and perhaps on thinking more about his own staircase than about the staircase of an ale-house, that time sufficient had elapsed for his anger to subside and cool.

Perceval. We have seen judges themselves who required a longer time for their anger to subside and cool, though sitting at their ease upon the cushion, to deliberate on matters where, if life was not at stake, property and character were; and not the property and character of drunkards and

reprobates, but of gentlemen in their own profes-them: he is anxious to provide for it more amply

sion, their equals in birth and education, in honour and abilities.

Romilly. Dear Perceval, you have forgotten your new dignity; however I will not betray you. We are treating this matter a little more loosely than we should do in parliament, but more openly and fairly. After an acquaintance and, I am proud to say it, a friendship of twenty-seven years, I think you will give me credit for some soundness of principle.

Perceval. If any man upon earth possesses it. Romilly. Then I will offer to you, if not as my opinion, at least as a subject worth reflection and consideration, whether even a virtuous man, about to fall into bankruptcy, may not commit a fraud, such as by our laws and practice is irremissibly capital?

Perceval. There, my dear Romilly, you go too far. The question (you must pardon me) is not only inconsiderate, but contradictory; the thing impossible. Your problem, in other figures, is this; whether a man may not be at once vicious and virtuous, a rogue and honest man: for you do not put a case in this manner, whether one who has hitherto been always honest, may not commit a capital crime, and afterward be honest again. A useless question even thus, among those which a wise man need not, and a scrupulous man would not, discuss. For the limits that separate us from offences ought not to be too closely under our eyes a large space of neutral ground should be left betwixt. Part of mankind, like boys and hunters, by seeing a hedge before them, are tempted to leap it, only because it is one. Whenever we doubt whether a thing may be done, let us resolve that it may not. I speak as a moralist, by no means as an instructor: in the former capacity all may speak to all: in the latter, none to you. Excuse me however, my dear Romilly, if in this instance I tell you plainly, that the joints of your logic seem to me to have been relaxed by your philanthropy.

Romilly. There are questions which may be investigated by two friends in private, and which I would on no account lay before the public in their rank freshness and fulness. In like manner there are substances, the chief nutriment of whole nations, which are poison until prepared. I would appeal to the judgment and the heart together. He is the most mischievous of incendiaries who inflames the heart against the judgment, and he is the most ferocious of schismatics who divides the judgment from the heart. My argument, if it carried such weight with it as to lay the foundation of a law, would render many men more compassionate (which, after all, is the best and greatest thing we can do on earth), and it would render no man fraudulent.

Suppose a young gentleman to have married a girl equal to himself in fortune, and that in the confidence of early affection, or by the improvidence of her parents, or from any other cause, there is no settlement. A family springs up around

than his paternal estate or his wife's property will allow: he enters into business: from unskilfulness, from the infidelity of agents, or from a change in the times and in the channels of commerce, he must become a bankrupt: his creditors are inexorable.

Perceval. That may happen: he is much to be pitied: I see no remedy.

Romilly. Speaking of those things which arise from our civil institutions, whatever is to be pitied is to be remedied. The greatest evils and the most lasting are the perverse fabrications of unwise policy, but neither their magnitude nor their duration are proofs of their immobility. They are proofs only that ignorance and indfference have slept profoundly in the chambers of tyranny, and that many interests have grown up, and seeded, and twisted their roots, in the crevices of many wrongs. The wrongs in all cases may be redressed, the interests may be transplanted. Prudence and patience do the work effectually.

I must proceed, although I see close before me the angle of divergence in our opinions.

I will not attempt to run away with your affections, Perceval; I will not burst into the midst of your little playful family, beginning to number it, and forgetting my intent, at the contemplation of its happiness, its innocence, its beauty. I will remove on the contrary every image of grief from the house of my two sufferers; I will suppose the boys and girls too young (just as yours are) for sorrow; I will suppose the mother not expressing it by tears, or wringing of hands, or frantic cries, or dumb desperation, or in any other way that might move you, but so devoted to her husband as for his sake to cover it with smiles, and to engulf it in the abysses of a broken heart. Yet I cannot make him, who is a man as we are, ignorant of her thoughts and feelings, ungrateful to her affection, past and present, or indifferent to her future lot. Obduracy and cruelty press upon him from one side, on the other are conjugal tenderness and parental love. A high and paramount sense of justice too supervenes. What he had received with his partner in misfortune, his conscience tells him, is hers; he had received it before he had received anything from his creditors; he collects the poor remains of it, and places them apart. Unused to fallacy and concealment, the unlawful act is discovered; the criminal is seized, imprisoned, brought out before the judge. Sunday, the day of rest from labour, the day formerly of his innocent projects, of his pleasantest walks, of visits from friends and kindred, of greeting, and union, and hospitality, and gladness; Sunday, the day on which a man's own little ones are dearer to him, are more his own, than on other days.. Sunday is granted to him. A further act of grace is extended. . his widow may bury him, and his children may learn their letters on his tombstone. Perceval. What can be done? We are always changing our laws.

Romilly. A proof how inconsiderately we enact

them. I verily do believe that a balloon by flying | trustees for the benefit of herself and her children over the House would empty it; so little sense of by that marriage. public good or of national dignity is left among us. What I would propose is this: I would, in such cases, deduct the widow's third from the bankrupt's property, and place it the hands of

Perceval. The motion would do you honour. Romilly. I willingly cede the honour to you. We who are out of place are suspected of innovation; or are well-meaning men, but want practice.

JOSEPH SCALIGER AND MONTAIGNE.

Scaliger. I know three things; wine, poetry, and the world.*

Montaigne. What could have brought you, M. | you are particular in these matters: not quite, I de l'Escale, to visit the old man of the mountain, should imagine, so great a judge in them as in other than a good heart? O how delighted and others? charmed I am to hear you speak such excellent gascon.* You rise early, I see you must have risen with the sun, to be here at this hour: it is a stout half-hour's walk from the brook. I have capital white wine, and the best cheese in Auvergne. You saw the goats and the two cows before the castle.

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Montaigne. Hold hard! let the pepper alone: I hate it. Tell him to broil plenty of ham; only two slices at a time, upon his salvation.

Scaliger. This, I perceive, is the antechamber to your library: here are your every-day books. Montaigne. Faith! I have no other. These are plenty, methinks; is not that your opinion? Scaliger. You have great resources within yourself, and therefore can do with fewer.

Montaigne. Why, how many now do you think here may be ?

Scaliger. I did not believe at first that there could be above fourscore.

Montaigne. Well! are fourscore few? are we talking of peas and beans?

Scaliger. I and my father (put together) have written well-nigh as many.

:

Montaigne. Ah! to write them is quite another thing but one reads books without a spur, or even a pat from our lady Vanity. How do you like my wine? it comes from the little knoll yonder you cannot see the vines: those chesnut-trees are between.

Scaliger. The wine is excellent; light, odoriferous, with a smartness like a sharp child's prattle. Montaigne. It never goes to the head, nor pulls the nerves, which many do as if they were guitarstrings. I drink a couple of bottles a-day, winter and summer, and never am the worse for it. You gentlemen of the Agennois have better in your province, and indeed the very best under the sun. I do not wonder that the parliament of Bordeaux should be jealous of their privileges, and call it Bordeaux. Now, if you prefer your own country wine, only say it: I have several bottles in my cellar, with corks as long as rapiers, and as polished. I do not know, M. de l'Escale, whether

"Ma mère était fort éloquente en Gascon." Scaligerana, p. 232.

Montaigne. You know one too many, then. I hardly know whether I know anything about poetry; for I like Clem Marot better than Ronsard; Ronsard is so plaguily stiff and stately, where there is no occasion for it; I verily do think the man must have slept with his wife in a cuirass. Scaliger. He had no wife: he was an abbé at Tours.

Montaigne. True; true; being an abbé he could never have one, and never want one; particularly at Tours, where the women profess an especial calling and most devotional turn for the religious.

Scaliger. It pleases me greatly that you like Marot. His version of the Psalms is lately set to music, and added to the New Testament of Geneva.

Montaigne. It is putting a slice of honeycomb into a barrel of vinegar, which will never grow the sweeter for it.

Scaliger. Surely you do not think in this fashion of the New Testament!

Montaigne. Who supposes it? Whatever is mild and kindly, is there. But Jack Calvin has thrown bird-lime and vitriol upon it, and whoever but touches the cover, dirties his fingers or burns them. Scaliger. Calvin is a very great man, I do assure you, M. de Montaigne.

Montaigne. I do not like your very great men who beckon me to them, call me their begotten, their dear child, and their entrails, and if I happen to say on any occasion, "I beg leave, sir, to dissent a little from you," stamp and cry, “The devil you do!" and whistle to the executioner.

Scaliger. You exaggerate, my worthy friend! Montaigne. Exaggerate do I? M. de l'Escale! What was it he did the other day to the poor devil there with an odd name? Melancthon I think it is.

Scaliger. I do not know: I have received no intelligence of late from Geneva.

Montaigne. It was but last night that our curate rode over from Lyons (he made two days of it, as you may suppose) and supped with me. He told me that Jack had got his old friend hanged and burnt. I could not join him in the joke, for I find none such in the New Testament, on which he would have founded it, and, if it is one, it is not in my manner or to my taste.

"Je me connais en trois choses, non in aliis, in vino, poesi, et juger des personnes." Scaligerana, p. 232.

Scaliger. I cannot well believe the report, my dear sir. He was rather urgent indeed on the combustion of the heretic Michael Servetus some years past.

Montaigne. A thousand to one, my spiritual guide mistook the name. He has heard of both, I warrant him, and thinks in his conscience that either is as good a roast as the other.

Scaliger. Theologians are proud and intolerant, and truly the farthest of all men from theology, if theology means the rational sense of religion, or indeed has anything to do with it in any way. Melancthon was the very best of the reformers; quiet, sedate, charitable, intrepid, firm in friendship, ardent in faith, acute in argument, and profound in learning.

Montaigne. Who cares about his argumentation or his learning, if he was the rest?

Scaliger. I hope you will suspend your judg ment on this affair, until you receive some more certain and positive information.

Montaigne. I can believe it of the Sieur Calvin. Scaliger. I cannot. John Calvin is a grave man, orderly and reasonable.

Montaigne. In my opinion he has not the order nor the reason of my cook. Mat never took a man for a sucking-pig, cleaning and scraping and buttering and roasting him; nor ever twitched God by the sleeve and swore he should not have his own way.

Scaliger. M. de Montaigne, have you ever studied the doctrine of predestination?

Montaigne. I should not understand it, if I had; and I would not break through an old fence merely to get into a cavern. I would not give a fig or a fig-leaf to know the truth of it, as far as any man can teach it me. Would it make me honester or happier, or, in other things, wiser? Scaliger. I do not know whether it would materially.

Montaigne. I should be an egregious fool then to care about it. Our disputes on controverted points have filled the country with missionaries and cut-throats. Both parties have shown a disposition to turn this comfortable old house of mine into a fortress. If I had inclined to either, the other would have done it. Come walk about it with me; after a ride you can do nothing better to take off fatigue.

Scaliger. A most spacious kitchen!

Montaigne. Look up!

should he know about the business? He speaks mighty bad French, and is as spiteful as the devil. Praised be God, we have a kind master, who thinks about us, and feels for us.

Scaliger. Upon my word, M. de Montaigne, this gallery is an interesting one.

Montaigne. I can show you nothing but my house and my dairy. We have no chase in the month of May, you know.. unless you would like to bait the badger in the stable. This is rare sport in rainy days.

Scaliger. Are you in earnest, M. de Montaigne? Montaigne. No, no, no, I cannot afford to worry him outright: only a little for pastime. . a morning's merriment for the dogs and wenches.

Scaliger. You really are then of so happy a temperament that, at your time of life, you can be amused by baiting a badger!

Montaigne. Why not? Your father, a wiser and graver and older man than I am, was amused by baiting a professor or critic. I have not a dog in the kennel that would treat the badger worse than brave Julius treated Cardan and Erasmus, and some dozens more. We are all childish, old as well as young; and our very last tooth would fain stick, M. de l'Escale, in some tender place of a neighbour. Boys laugh at a person who falls in the dirt; men laugh rather when they make him fall, and most when the dirt is of their own laying.

Is not the gallery rather cold, after the kitchen? We must go through it to get into the court where I keep my tame rabbits: the stable is hard by: come along, come along.

Scaliger. Permit me to look a little at those banners. Some of them are old indeed.

Montaigne. Upon my word, I blush to think I never took notice how they are tattered. I have no fewer than three women in the house, and in a summer's evening, only two hours long, the worst of these rags might have been darned across.

Scaliger. You would not have done it surely! Montaigne. I am not over-thrifty.. the women might have been better employed. It is as well as it is then; ay?

Scaliger. I think so. Montaigne. So be it.

Scaliger. They remind me of my own family, we being descended from the great Cane della Scala, prince of Verona, and from the house of Hapsburg, as you must have heard from my

Scaliger. You have twenty or more flitches of father. bacon hanging there.

Montaigne. And if I had been a doctor or a captain, I should have had a cobweb and predestination in the place of them. Your soldiers of the religion on the one side, and of the good old faith on the other, would not have left unto me safe and sound even that good old woman there. Scaliger. O yes they would, I hope. Old Woman. Why dost giggle, Mat?

What

*

Montaigne. What signifies it to the world whether the great Cane was tied to his grandmother or not? As for the house of Hapsburg, if you could put together as many such houses as would make up a city larger than Cairo, they would not be worth his study, or a sheet of paper on the table of it.

"Descendimus ex filiâ Comitis Hapsburgensis." Scaligerana, p. 231.

ANACREON AND POLYCRATES.

Polycrates. Embrace me, my brother poet. Anacreon. What have you written, Polycrates? Polycrates. Nothing. But invention is the primary part of us; and the mere finding of a brass ring in the belly of a dogfish, has afforded me a fine episode in royalty. You could not have made so much out of it.

Anacreon. I have heard various stories this morning about the matter: and, to say the truth, my curiosity led me hither.

Polycrates. It was thus. I ordered my cook to open, in the presence of ten or twelve witnesses, a fat mullet, and to take out of it an emerald ring, which I had laid aside from the time when, as you may remember, I felt some twitches of the gout in my knuckle.

Anacreon. The brass ring was really found in a fish some time ago; might not a second seem suspicious? And with what object is this emerald one extracted from such another mine?

Polycrates. To prove the constancy and immutability of my fortune. It is better for a prince to be fortunate than wise: people know that his fortune may be communicated, his wisdom not; and, if it could, nobody would take it who could as readily carry off a drachma. In fact, to be fortunate is to be powerful, and not only without the danger of it, but without the displeasure.

Anacreon. Ministers are envied, princes never; because envy can exist there only where something (as people think) may be raised or destroyed. You were proceeding very smoothly with your reflections, Polycrates, but, with all their profundity, are you unaware that mullets do not eat such things?

Polycrates. True; the people however swallow anything; and, the further out of the course of nature the action is, the greater name for good fortune, or rather for the favour of divine providence, shall I acquire.

Anacreon. Is that the cook yonder?

Polycrates. Yes; and he also has had some share of the same gifts. I have rewarded him with an Attic talent: he seems to be laying the gold pieces side by side, or in lines and quincunxes, just as if they were so many dishes.

Croesus is unwarlike and weak, confident and supercilious, and you had prepared the minds of his officers by your liberality, not to mention the pity and sorrow we put together over our wine, ready to pour it forth on the bleeding hearts of his subjects, treated so ungenerously for their fidelity. Still your own people might require, at least once a-year, the proof of your invisibility in public by putting on the brazen ring.

Polycrates. I had devised as much nothing is easier than an optical deception, at the distance that kings on solemn occasions keep from the people. A cloud of incense rising from under the floor through several small apertures, and other contrivances were in readiness. But I abandoned my first design, and thought of conquering Lydia, instead of claiming it from inheritance. For, the ring of a fisherman would be too impudent a fabrication, in the claim of a kingdom or even of a village, and my word upon other occasions might be doubted. Croesus is superstitious: there are those about him who will persuade him not to contend with a man so signally under the protection of the Gods.

Anacreon. Cannot you lay aside all ideas of invasion, and rest quiet and contented here?

Polycrates. No man, O Anacreon, can rest anywhere quiet in his native country who has deprived his fellow-citizens of their liberties; contented are they only who have taken nothing from another; and few even of those. As, by eating much habitually, we render our bodies by degrees capacious of more, and uncomfortable without it, so, after many acquisitions, we think new ones necessary. Hereditary kings invade each other's dominions from the feelings of children, the love of having and of destroying; their education being always bad, and their intellects for the mostpart low and narrow. But we who have great advantages over them in our mental faculties, these having been constantly exercised and exerted, and in our knowledge of men, wherein the least foolish of them are quite deficient, find wars and civil tumults absolutely needful to our stability and repose.

Anacreon. By Hercules! you people in purple Anacreon. I go to him and see... By Jupiter! are very like certain sea-fowls I saw in my voyage my friend, you have made no bad kettle of fish of from Teios hither. In fine weather they darted it to-day... The fellow does not hear me. Let upward and downward, sidelong and circuitously, us hope, Polycrates, that it may not break in turn- and fished and screamed as if all they seized and ing out. If your cook was remunerated so mag-swallowed was a torment to them: again, when it nificently, what must you have done for the blew a violent gale, they appeared to sit perfectly fisherman! at their ease, buoyant upon the summit of the

Polycrates. He was paid the price of his fish. Anacreon. Royally said and done! Your former plan was more extensive. To feign that a brazen ring was the ring of Gyges is indeed in itself no great absurdity; but to lay claim to the kingdom of Lydia by the possession of it, was extravagant.

waves.

Polycrates. After all, I cannot be thought to have done any great injury to my friends the citizens of Samos. It is true I have taken away what you ingenious men call their liberties: but have you never, my friend Anacreon, snatched

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