This is taken from Bevil Higgons' "Short View of English History:"

"So weak and fallible is that admired maxim: 'factum valet quod fieri non debuit,' an excuse first invented to palliate the unfledged villany of some men who are ashamed to be knaves, yet have not the courage to be honest."

Another borrowed thought in Junius occurs in the well-known passage where he employs that curious simile of the caput mortuum of vitriol :—

"He was forced to go through every division, resolution, composition, and refinement of political chemistry, before he happily arrived at the caput mortuum of vitriol in your grace. Flat and insipid in your retired state; but brought into action, you become vitriol again. Such are the extremes of alternate indolence or fury which have governed your whole administration."

The simile here has evidently been taken from these lines in Rochester :

"Wit, like tierce claret, when 't begins to pall,

Neglected lies and 's of no use at all;

But in its full perfection of decay

Turns vinegar, and comes again in play."

Then we have the passage in another of the "Letters: "__

"In the shipwreck of the state, trifles float and are preserved; while everything solid and valuable sinks to the bottom and is lost for ever."

Which is but a prose version of the thought expressed by Dryden's couplet :

"Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow;

He who would search for pearls must dive below."

U

Chenevix, in his "Essay on National Character," remarks:

"This single day is sufficient to prove that the trident of Neptune is the true sceptre of the universe."

Here is a saying well worthy of an Englishman; the merit of which, however, belongs to the French poet Lemierre, who says in his

"Le trident de Neptune est le sceptre du monde."

poem

One of the most beautiful similes in any language occurs in a passage in Hallam's "Literature of Europe." The writer is speaking of Pascal, and remarks:

"His melancholy genius plays in wild and rapid flashes, like lightning round the scathed oak, about the fallen greatness of man."

It occurred to me, on reading this, that it must have emanated from some imagination of a more poetic cast than Hallam's; and, some time after, I was not surprised to meet with it in this passage in Moore's "Lalla Rookh:"

In

every glance there broke without control The flashes of a bright but troubled soul; Where sensibility still wildly play'd,

Like lightning round the ruins it had made."

Macaulay, in his "Essay on Sir James Mackintosh," first published in 1835, presents us with

another striking similitude. He is speaking of the progress of the national mind, and compares its ebb and flow to those of the sea :

"We have often thought that the motion of the public mind resembles that of the sea, when the tide is rising. Each successive wave rushes forward, breaks, and rolls back, but the great flood is steadily coming in. A person who looked on the waters only for a moment might fancy that they were retiring. A person who looked on them only for five minutes might fancy that they were rushing capriciously to and fro. But when he keeps his eye on them for a quarter of an hour, and sees one sea-mark disappear after another, it is impossible for him to doubt of the general direction in which the ocean is moved. Just such has been the course of events in England."

This beautiful simile may have been suggested by Longinus, who compares Homer, writing the "Iliad," to the ocean at highwater-mark, and Homer, writing the "Odyssey," to the ocean receding within its ordinary limits, yet leaving behind it the vestiges of its former imposing grandeur. It will be seen, however, on a closer examination, that there is nothing in common between the two writers but the object which serves as the means of comparison. But if Macaulay has not borrowed from Longinus, Carlyle has borrowed from Macaulay; for, in one of his Lectures delivered in 1840, I find Macaulay's similitude reproduced in nearly the same words, with this difference, that, while Macaulay employs it to illustrate the progress of the national mind, Carlyle uses it to describe

what he believes to be the retrogression or disappearance of Popery :

Popery cannot come back any more than Paganism can— which also still lingers in some countries. But indeed it is with these things as with the ebbing of the sea: you look at the waves oscillating hither, thither, on the beach; for minutes you cannot tell how it is going. Look in half an hour where it is look in half a century where your Popehood is!"

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La Rochefoucauld, with characteristic insight, says in his 326th Maxim :

"Le ridicule déshonore plus que le déshonneur.”

Rousseau, in his "Nouvelle Héloise," has the same remark :

"A considérer ces propos selon nos idées, ils sont bien plus railleurs que mordans, et tombent moins sur le vice que sur le ridicule. Malheur à qui prête le flanc au ridicule; il ne déchire pas seulement les mœurs, la vertu; il marque jusqu'au vice même."

And Viscount D'Arlincourt, in "Trois Châteaux," has expressed it in these words:

“ Qu'on nomme quelqu'un homme infâme à Paris, cela frappe à peine que l'on dise homme ridicule, on est tué du coup."

The same notion occurs in three of our English writers. Pope has it in one of his

Letters :

"I have learned that there are some who would rather be wicked than ridiculous; and therefore it may be safer to attack vices than follies."

Sir Bulwer Lytton, in "England and the English:"

"The aristocratic influences have set up ridicule as the Criminal Code."

And Mrs. Gore in the following passage:

"Be vile, be prodigal, be false, but do not make yourself ridiculous: a butt or a bore ranks with the worst of criminals."

D'Israeli, in the "Literary Character," has this striking observation :

"The defects of great men are the consolation of the dunces;"

which Lord Byron quotes as a sample of D'Israeli's incomparable wisdom. It turns out, however, that the latter was indebted for the remark, such as it is, to Pope, who says in one of his letters to Swift:

"A few loose things sometimes fall from men of wit, by which censorious fools judge as ill of them as they possibly can, for their own comfort."

Goldsmith, in the "Citizen of the World," has the same thought :

"The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves the most foolish."

And it occurs in Burke in this pithy form :

"Wisdom is not the most severe corrector of Folly."Reflections on the French Revolution.