Imatges de pàgina
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with that habit of body, we see consequent to an indulgent state of indolence and rest.

Nor is the lazy habit ruinous to the body only. The languishing disease corrupts all the enjoyments of a vigorous and healthy sense, and carries its infections into the mind. For, however the body may for a while hold out, it is impossible that the mind, in which the distemper is seated, can escape without an immediate affliction and disorder. The habit begets a tediousness and anxiety which influences the whole temper, and converts the unnatural rest into an unhappy sort of activity, ill-humour and spleen.

As in the body, when no labour or natural exercise is used, the spirits which want their due employment turn against the constitution, and find work for themselves in a destructive way; so in a soul or mind unexercised, and which languishes for want of proper action and occupation, the thoughts and affections being obstructed in their due course, and deprived of their natural energy, raise disquiet, and foment a tormenting kind of agitation. Hence the temper becomes more impotent in passion, more incapable of real moderation, and like prepared fuel readily takes fire by the least spark.

While some part of mankind are by necessity confined to labour, others are provided with

abundance of all things, by the pains and labours of inferiors. Now if among the superior and easy sort, there be not something of fit and proper employment raised in the room of what is wanting in common labour and toil; if instead of an application to any sort of work, such as has a good and honest end in society, (as letters, sciences, arts, husbandry, public affairs, economy, or the like,) there be a thorough neglect of all duty or employment; a settled idleness, supineness and inactivity, this of necessity must occasion a relaxed and dissolute state: it must produce a total disorder in the passions, and create the strangest irregularities; which are scarcely to be met with among those who are taken up in honest and due employment, and have been well inured to it from their very youth.

ESSAY 81.

THE AFFECTED OR FORMAL MAN

(Butler.)

IS a piece of clockwork, that moves only as it is wound up and set, and not like a voluntary agent. He is a mathematical body, nothing but a point, a line, a superficies, and perfectly abstract from matter. He walks as stiffly and uprightly as a dog that is taught to go on his hinder legs, and carries his hands as the other does his fore feet. He is very ceremonious and full of respect to himself, for no man uses those formalities, that does not expect the same from others. All his actions and words are set down in so exact a method, that an indifferent accountant may cast him up to a farthing. He does every thing by rule, as if it were in a course of diet, and did not eat, but take a dose of meat and drink, and not walk but proceed, not go but march.

He draws up himself with admirable conduct in a very regular and well ordered body. All

his business and affairs are junctures and transactions; and when he speaks with a man he gives him audience. He does not carry, but marshal himself; and no one member of his body politic takes place of another without due right of precedence. He does all things by rules of proportion, and never gives himself the freedom to manage his gloves or his watch in an irregular and arbitrary way; but is always ready to render an account of his demeanour to the most strict and severe disquisition.

He sets his face as if it were cast in plaster, and never admits of any commotion in his countenance, nor so much as the innovation of a smile without serious and mature deliberation; but he preserves his looks in a judicial way, according as they have always been established.

ESSAY 82.

SOCRATES.

(Melmoth.)

IT is uncertain upon what occasion Socrates, the patriarch of philosophy, was distinguished by the Oracle with the honourable designation of the "Wisest of men." Diogenes Laertius seems to intimate, that it was conferred upon him on account of that practical wisdom which so strongly marked every part of his exemplary conduct, particularly in the equanimity and moderation. with which he bore the severe trials to which his patience was exposed.

But Socrates himself, as we learn from Cicero in another part of his writings, assigned a different and more probable reason, attributing this high encomium to his just discernment of the limits of the human mind, and confining

VOL. II.

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