BREVIA.

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BY JAMES W. WALL.

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Whatever original thoughts people may think fit to boast of, there is scarcely any idea which must not before have passed through the minds of many. Let it be sufficient then to the good-natured reader, if some of the present thoughts may not happen to have occurred to him, or if they are not all remembered to have done so.

In preparing these Brevia, I have not knowingly adopted any one thought or expression of other writers. At the same time, I do not affect originality. Lucian, Cervantes and Rabelais have forestalled humor; Horace, Juvenal, and Perseus have exhausted satire; and upon the subject of love, Ovid and Tibullus have left us nothing new to say. The letter of Rousseau, so much admired for its exquisite tenderness and sensibility, beginning—“Mourons, ma douce amie,” is but an imitation of Chærea’s speech in one of Terence’s comedies, who expresses his raptures in the same ideas and expressions. “Nunc est projectò tempu cum perpeti me possum interjici;” and of Phædria’s speech in Phermio—“Ut mihi liceat tam dice quod amo, frui, jam depacisci mortem cupio.” Even the best writers, therefore, may be accused of plagiarism; but merely to have the same ideas, many of which are common to all mankind, is no proof of it.

BREVIA.

Friendship divided amongst many, is like a mirror broken into separate small pieces, wherein each can partly see himself, but less of himself as the pieces are divided into more parts.

Our public boarding-schools are said to bring all boys forward; which is only true in part. Great liberty and numbers elevate boys of bold and daring dispositions, and give opportunities of tyrannising over meek and modest minds; thus, those spirits which ought to be restrained are ruined by indulgence, and those which ought to be cherished and encouraged are depressed.

Obstinacy and contradiction are like a paper kite; they are only kept up while you pull against them.

The best wives have been brought up in a family where there has been a subordination to men. Forsaken widows and disappointed aunts set up a hostile warfare against the other sex, and inculcate early prejudices in young women’s minds, which generally take too strong root to be eradicated.

People are generally in the end obliged to make an apology for those very virtues which alone dignify human nature. Friendship, good-nature, and generosity have often conducted a man to jail, where he has been obliged, before he could obtain assistance, to confess himself a fool, and to promise to divest himself of all such companions for the future; or, to adopt the most effectual method, totally to disavow the acquaintance of those virtues altogether, and pretend that they assumed the more worthy form and disguise of discretion and worldly wisdom, which authorised him to act as he did for the sake of his own interest.

Love often turns to the greatest hatred, as the sharpest vinegar is made from the sweetest sugar.

Economy is often tempted into expense, merely from the cheapness of it.

Books are quiet, amiable friends; their information is pleasing, because communicated without petulance, or affected superiority. You must even take some trouble to find out the knowledge you wish to acquire from them, notwithstanding your implicit respect and avowed ignorance. They are generally, too, at home, and their access requires little court.

How disappointed your acquaintances are, if you bear your misfortunes with calmness and cheerfulness! Some, indeed, derive consolation in thinking their assistance will not be asked; but most are mortified in not being able to insult you by their compassion, while they find arguments to heighten your distress.

How seldom utility is considered in our system of modern education! Personal accomplishments can not be of any use in this country, at least, to either men or women, above ten or twelve years; after which they are rather hid, or render the possession ridiculous. Ought the father of a family be able to distort his body in the fashionable polka, or the mother to sing a fine song.

A man gives entertainments only for criticism; and people, on their return home, revenge themselves for the obligation of the invitation, by laughing at his vanity for pretending to live at so much expense.

The Egyptians offered to their god Isis an herb—Persica—whose fruit was like a heart, and the leaf like a tongue. Modern professions and love offerings have a different fruit and a different leaf; the profession is all heart, and the fruit all tongue.

Doctor Johnson says, “that allowances are seldom made for ill success;” and it may be truly said, that reasons are seldom narrowly investigated for good success. Public men generally meet with more praise and blame, in both, than they deserve; and at the end of their lives the balance is probably even.

The easy, good-natured man is like one of the feræ naturæ: every body hunts him as their prey; and, instead of being cherished by every one, he is claimed as their property: if he is caressed, it is only to draw him into a snare.

A politician, like the Cyprian, seldom grants favors but to those who can amply repay them. Virtue, for them, may be its own reward: they only lavish their favors on those who contribute to their interest.

Every wife would make her husband as many compliments as Eve pays to Adam, in Milton, if he was the only man in the world; so would every man, if his wife was the only woman.

People are better pleased with the knavish lawyer—who instructs them how to cheat the adverse party in a cause, or to avoid the payment of a just claim, by a legal technicality, than with the honest one—who recommends an equitable arbitration.

Romance and comedy writers always make lovers rich before they marry: they know this is an essential requisite to the completion of happiness, both in the hero and the heroine. Unfortunately, young people follow the example of these romantic characters in love, but not in the acquisition of fortune: they forget that love alone will not make them happy, and that, like lunatics, as they come more and more to themselves, they will require more and more the comforts and conveniences of life, which, in the paroxysm of passion, were never attended to.

The people of Fire Island are accused of pillaging strangers who are shipwrecked. Are not the inhabitants of inland towns equally eager to divide the spoil of a deceased neighbor or friend, and to glut themselves with the idea of obtaining his property at half the value?

Prudent people never are beloved. Imprudence, by preventing envy, raises popularity; yet prudence is the sole friend of generosity. Generosity is like a beautiful and expansive river; we admire its beauty, and enjoy its advantages, but neither see nor think of the secret springs that feed it.

The idea of good or bad fortune attending a man, has been generally received in all ages. Cicero recommended Pompey to the Romans for their general, as he was a man of good fortune; and Cardinal Mazarin, when any officer was recommended to him, always asked, “Est il heureux?”

We never regard innovation, or even oppression, till it comes home to ourselves. In the life of Cromwell, an anecdote is told of a clerk in chancery, who had seen with great indifference all the alterations that had been made in the constitution both in church and state; but when he was told there was to be some new regulations in the sex’ clerk’s office—Nay, says he, if they begin once to strike out fundamentals, there is no telling where they will stop.

Public opinion is a tyrant—cruel are the sacrifices it demands.

How many fathers there are who always comfort themselves with saying, “I shall die poor, but let my sons make their way in the world as I have done!” To which some complaisant neighbor replies, “And I am sure, sir, they cannot do better!” But should not parents reflect that their sons have not only the same difficulties to encounter which they have had, but the additional disadvantage, that having been brought up in habits of luxury and idleness, to which the parents themselves in their youth were strangers.

Married people sometimes study to appear as fond as lovers, passing their time in billing and cooing like turtle doves. Let them remember that bankrupts in love, like those in fortune, appear in gaudy colors, to keep up their credit.

A deaf and dumb person being asked what is forgiveness, took out his pencil and wrote the answer to the written question thus: “It is the odor which flowers yield when trampled upon.” What a volume of exquisite poetry and at the same time forcible truth is contained in it.

I remember somewhere to have read of a tyrannical ruler, who is said to have publicly erected altars to cruelty and injustice. Many modern worshipers of the same hideous divinities are equally as zealous as this tyrant: but with the essential difference, that their altars are erected in private, within the penetralia of their own homes. Like the Egyptian priesthood, after having performed the most diabolical rites, they come forth arrayed in the white robes of innocence. And society is too apt, like the “ignobile vulgus” of Egypt, to greet them with the same reverence they did their priesthood. They, too, have their esoteric and exoteric theology—the one is their religion in private, the other abroad.

“The nobility of the Spencers has been enriched by the trophies of Marlborough; but I exhort them to consider ‘The Fairy Queen’ as the most precious jewel in their coronet.”

This lively paragraph may be found in the memoirs of Gibbon; and the sentiment therein conveyed is no less beautiful than true; for after all, what is military glory and renown when compared with the fame of the distinguished poet, historian, or man of letters. The hero, after the lapse of a few centuries shines like a very distant constellation, merely visible in the wide expanse of history, while the poet and historian continue to sparkle in the eyes of all men, like that radiant star of the evening, perpetually hailed by the voice of gratitude, affection, and delight.

“The lawyer,” said Burke, “has his forms and his positive institutions, and he adheres to them with a veneration altogether as religious as the divine. The worst cause cannot be so prejudicial to the litigant as his attorney’s ignorance of forms. A good parson once said, where mystery begins, there religion ends. May not the same be said of justice, that where the mystery of forms begin, there all justice ends.”

There is a great deal more truth in the above quotation from Burke, than is generally admitted by the followers of Coke and Littleton. The satire may be, perhaps, too broad, as the whole essay in which it occurs was a burlesque upon Bolingbroke; but, nevertheless, there is truth in the sarcasm. Law, as a system, even in this age of intelligence, is cumbered up with useless forms, absurd fictions, and unmeaning technicalities; serving only to strew with stumbling blocks the pathway to the temple of justice, which should ever be of safe and easy approach. The system of the administration of laws in this country, needs a thorough overhauling. The Augean stables were not half as much in want of the labors of an Hercules, as the departments of law of the labors of the modern reformer. And as the stables in the classic fable were cleansed by the turning of a river through them, so all that it wants now in reference to the administration of law, is, that the current of popular sentiment should be turned in that direction; and gathering strength as it goes

“Vires acquirit eundo,”

it will thoroughly cleanse and purify the Augean stables of the law.

The impudent man has wonderful advantages; he successfully assumes every talent, and pretends to every branch of learning; and passes the time, spent by others in recluse retirement and gloomy study, in making useful friends, and acquiring the habits of the world.

Any transitory marks of distinction, or ideal honors, produce future regret, and often poignant grief. The beauty of the ball is little flattered, twenty years afterward, by that praise and admiration which is past and forgotten, any more than the collegian, who gained every literary prize, which vainly taught him to expect admiration, applause, and respect through life.

Imprudence is so often the cause of misfortunes, that the Cardinal Richelieu used to say, that imprudence and misfortune were synonymous.

Memory is productive of more misery than happiness. Misfortune leaves unpleasing vestiges, whilst the remembrance of pleasures past creates regret.

Fortune, like the fickle female, despises the object of her power. She slights the very sighs that she creates; and whilst the suppliant is disregarded, she courts the hand which rejects her. Relentless and obdurate to her most passionate admirers, what she refuses to love, she often lavishes on indifference.