ANECDOTE GALLERY.

CLASSICAL ANECDOTES OF CONTINENCE IN MAN.

Many noble instances are recorded by ancient historians of the practice of this noble virtue; but in the reminiscences of our youthful studies, there is no incident that occurs with more freshness to the memory than that of the continence of Scipio Africanus, related by Livy. It appears that the soldiers of Scipio's army, after the taking of new Carthage, brought before him a young lady of great beauty. Scipio inquiring concerning her country and parents, ascertained that she was betrothed to Allutius, prince of the Celtiberians. He immediately ordered her parents and bridegroom to be sent for. In the meantime he was informed that the young prince was so excessively enamoured of his bride, that he could not survive the loss of her. For this reason, as soon as he appeared, and before he spoke to her parents, he took great care to talk with him. "As you and I are both young," said he, "we can converse together with greater freedom. When your bride, who had fallen into the hands of my soldiers, was brought before me, I was informed that you loved her passionately; and, in truth, her perfect beauty left me no room to doubt of it. If I were at liberty to indulge a youthful passion—I mean honourable and lawful wedlock, and were not solely engrossed by the affairs of my republic, I might have hoped to have been pardoned my excessive love for so charming a mistress; but as I am situated, and have it in my power, with pleasure I promote your happiness. Your future spouse has met with as civil and modest treatment from me, as if she had been amongst her own parents, who are soon to be yours too. I have kept her pure, in order to have it in my power to make you a present worthy of you and of me." The magnanimity of his behaviour did not close here, for when the parents of the fair captive brought an immense sum of money to ransom her, they were much surprised at Scipio's noble conduct, and in the ecstacy of joy and gratitude, they pressed him to accept it as a token of thankfulness. Scipio, unable to resist their importunate solicitations, told them he accepted it; but ordering it to be laid at his feet, he thus addressed Allutius:—"To the portion you are to receive from your father-in-law, I add this, and beg you would accept it as a nuptial present:" thus exhibiting in the whole transaction a rare instance of modesty, disinterestedness, and benevolence, well worthy of imperishable record, as a moral lesson for mankind.

When Araspes had commended the fair Panthea to Cyrus, as a beauty worthy his admiration, he replied—"For that very reason I will not see her, lest if by thy persuasion I should see her but once, she herself might persuade me to see her often, and spend more time with her than would be for the advantage of my own affairs."—Alexander the Great would not trust his eyes in the presence of the beauteous Queen of Persia, but kept himself out of the reach of her charms, and treated only with her aged mother. These, as they were peculiar acts of continence, so were they as absolutely checks of curiosity, which never sleeps in youthful breasts when beauty elicits admiration.

Cicero, treating of the many degrees of human commerce and society, places matrimony in the first rank. In fact, marriage is not only a state capable of the highest human felicity, but it is an institution well calculated to destroy those rank and noxious weeds of the passions which, by their pestiferous influence, spread misery and death around the social hemisphere. Marriage is the basis of community, and the cement of society;—it is, or ought to be, that state of perfect friendship in which there are, according to Pythagoras, "two bodies with but one soul." It is in the genial atmosphere of this noble communion of sentiment and affection that the virtue of continence comes forth in all its dazzling splendour. Milton has touched this subject with so chaste and elegant a pen, that the description, one would think, must confirm the husband in his happiness, and reclaim the man of profligate and licentious principles:—

J.P.

THE GREAT LORD THURLOW.

Of the eloquence of Lord Thurlow, and of his manner in debate, Mr. Butler has given a striking account:—"At times Lord Thurlow was superlatively great. It was the good fortune of the Reminiscent to hear his celebrated reply to the Duke of Grafton, during the inquiry into Lord Sandwich's administration of Greenwich Hospital. His Grace's action and delivery, when he addressed the house, were singularly dignified and graceful; but his matter was not equal to his manner. He reproached Lord Thurlow with his plebeian extraction, and his recent admission into the peerage: particular circumstances caused Lord Thurlow's reply to make a deep impression on the Reminiscent. His lordship had spoken too often, and began to be heard with a civil but visible impatience. Under these circumstances he was attacked in the manner we have mentioned. He rose from the woolsack, and advanced slowly to the place from which the chancellor generally addresses the house; then fixing on the duke the look of Jove when he grasps the thunder, 'I am amazed,' he said, in a level tone of voice, 'at the attack the noble duke has made on me. Yes, my lords,' considerably raising his voice, 'I am amazed at his grace's speech. The noble duke cannot look before him, behind him, or on either side of him, without seeing some noble peer who owes his seat in this house to his successful exertions in the profession to which I belong. Does he not feel that it is as honourable to owe it to these, as to being the accident of an accident? To all these noble lords the language of the noble duke is applicable and as insulting as it is to myself. But I don't fear to meet it single and alone. No one venerates the peerage more than I do;—but, my lords, I must say that the peerage solicited me, not I the peerage;—nay, more, I can say, and will say, that as a peer of parliament, as speaker of this right honourable house, as keeper of the great seal, as guardian of his majesty's conscience, as lord high chancellor of England, nay, even in that character alone in which the noble duke would think it an affront to be considered—as a Man, I am at this moment as respectable—I beg leave to add, I am at this time as much respected, as the proudest peer I now look down upon.' The effect of this speech, both within the walls of parliament and out of them, was prodigious. It gave Lord Thurlow an ascendancy in the house which no chancellor had ever possessed: it invested him, in public opinion, with a character of independence and honour; and this, though he was ever on the unpopular side in politics, made him always popular with the people."

The legal talents and acquirements of Lord Thurlow have been the subject of frequent panegyric; but it may, perhaps, be questioned, whether in all cases those eulogiums were just. It has been said—but with what truth it is difficult to form an opinion—that his lordship was much indebted to Mr. Hargrave, for the learning by which his judgments were sometimes distinguished, and that Mr. Hargrave received a handsome remuneration for these services. "As lord chancellor," says a writer who was personally acquainted with his lordship, "from a well-placed confidence in Mr. Hargrave, who was indefatigable in his service, he had occasion to give himself less trouble than any other man in that high station. An old free-speaking companion of his, well known at Lincoln's Inn, would sometimes say to me, 'I met the great law lion this morning going to Westminster; but he was so busily reading in the coach what his provider had supplied him with, that he took no notice of me.'"

The ardent zeal with which Lord Thurlow contested the great question of the regency, led him, if we may credit the narrative of one who was a party to the debate, to be guilty of an act of great disingenuousness. Dr. Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, in the course of a speech, in which he supported the claims of the Prince of Wales, incidentally cited a passage from Grotius, with regard to the definition of the word right. "The chancellor, in his reply," says the bishop in his memoirs, "boldly asserted that he perfectly well remembered the passage I had quoted from Grotius, and that it solely respected natural, but was inapplicable to civil, rights. Lord Loughborough, the first time I saw him after the debate, assured me that before he went to sleep that night he had looked into Grotius, and was astonished to find that the chancellor, in contradicting me, had presumed on the ignorance of the house, and that my quotation was perfectly correct. What miserable shifts do great men submit to, in supporting their parties! The Chancellor Thurlow," continues the bishop, "was an able and upright judge, but as the speaker of the house of lords, he was domineering and insincere. It was said of him, that in the cabinet he opposed everything, proposed nothing, and was ready to support anything. I remember Lord Camden's saying to me one night, when the chancellor was speaking contrary, as he thought, to his own conviction, 'There now! I could not do that: he is supporting what he does not believe a word of.'"

Roscoe's Lives of Eminent Lawyers—Cabinet Cyclopaedia.