Tomlinsoniana | Page 9

custom]--one springs from the senses, the other grows out of custom. Now, neither of these, my dear young friends, is the love that you pretend to feel,--the love of lovers. Your passion, having only its foundation (and that unacknowledged) in the senses, owes everything else to the imagination. Now, the imagination of the majority is different in complexion and degree in every country and in every age; so also, and consequently, is the love of the imagination. As a proof, observe that you sympathize with the romantic love of other times or nations only in proportion as you sympathize with their poetry and imaginative literature. The love which stalks through the "Arcadia" or "Amadis of Gaul" is to the great bulk of readers coldly insipid or solemnly ridiculous. Alas! when those works excited enthusiasm, so did the love which they describe. The long speeches, the icy compliments, expressed the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone, or the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial. Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,--all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before,--go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most beauteous princesses!" The only love-poetry that stands through all time and appeals to all hearts is that which is founded on either or both the species of love natural to all men,--the love of the senses, and the love of custom. In the latter is included what middle-aged men call the rational attachment, the charm of congenial minds, as well as the homely and warmer accumulation of little memories of simple kindness, or the mere brute habitude of seeing a face as one would see a chair. These, sometimes singly, sometimes skilfully blended, make the theme of those who have perhaps loved the most honestly and the most humanly; these yet render Tibullus pathetic, and Ovid a master over tender affections; and these, above all, make that irresistible and all-touching inspiration which subdues the romantic, the calculating, the old, the young, the courtier, the peasant, the poet, the man of business, in the glorious love-poetry of Robert Burns.

THE GREAT ENTAILED.
The great inheritance of man is a commonwealth of blunders. One race spend their lives in botching the errors transmitted to them by another; and the main cause of all political, that is, all the worst and most general, blunders is this,--the same rule we apply to individual cases we will not apply to public. All men consent that swindling for a horse is swindling,--they punish the culprit and condemn the fault. But in a State there is no such unanimity. Swindling, Lord help you! is called by some fine name; and cheating grows grandiloquent, and styles itself "Policy." In consequence of this there is always a battle between those who call things by their right names and those who pertinaciously give them the wrong ones. Hence all sorts of confusion. This confusion extends very soon to the laws made for individual cases; and thus in old States, though the world is still agreed that private swindling is private swindling, there is the Devil's own difficulty in punishing the swindling of the public. The art of swindling now is a different thing to the art of swindling a hundred years ago; but the laws remain the same. Adaptation in private cases is innovation in public; so, without repealing old laws, they make new. Sometimes these are effectual, but more often not. Now, my beloved pupils, a law is a gun which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits some one else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime; and hence we go on multiplying sins and evils, and faults and blunders, till society becomes the organized disorder for picking pockets.

THE REGENERATION OF A KNAVE.
A man who begins the world by being a fool often ends it by becoming a knave; but he who begins as a knave, if he be a rich man (and