Thomas Brown

“ It is a just and beautiful observation of an ancient Stoic, that time which is past is like something consecrated to the gods, over which fortune and mortality have no longer any power, and that, dreadful as it must be to the wicked, to whom their own memory is an object of terror, it still, to the virtuous, offers itself as a consolation or joy—not in single moments like the present hour, but in all that long series of years which rises before us, and remains with us at our bidding. ”

“ A young comedian is apt to make every body his jest; but when arriv’d at your years, himself becomes a jest to every body. Youth gives an air to wit that renders it delightful, but for an old man to pretend to talk wisely, is like a musician’s endeavouring to fumble out a fine sonata upon a wind-broach, tho’ the time be good, the instrument is imperfect, and the organs want that sound which should give a grace to the harmony. ”

“ When we consider the powers of his mind, even without reference to the wonders which he has produced on earth, what room does man afford for astonishment and admiration! His senses, his memory, his reason, the past, the present, the future, the whole universe, and, if the universe have any limits, even more than the whole universe, comprised in a single thought; and, amid all these changes of feelings that succeed each other, in rapid and endless variety, a permanent and unchangeable duration, compared with which, the duration of external things is but the existence of a moment. ”

“ I am of that old opinion, that all mankind are either fools or knaves; and it is a maxim in my politicks, that he who will not be a knave, the world will make a fool of him. One man’s oversight is always another’s gain. How then can you condemn me for laying hold of that opportunity, which your weakness gave me as a tryal of my wit? and had I neglected making a true use of it to my own advantage, I had made myself a greater fool than he who trusted a single man’s honesty with so large a temptation. ”

“ But he who has lived, as man should live, is permitted to enjoy that best happiness which man can enjoy,—to behold, in one continued series, those years of benevolent wishes or of heroic suffering, which are at once his merit and his reward. He is surrounded by his own pure thoughts and actions, which, from the most remote distance, seem to shine upon him wherever his glance can reach; as in some climate of perpetual summer, in which the inhabitant sees nothing but fruits and blossoms, and inhales only fragrance, and sunshine, and delight. ”

“ I know I am old and past recovering an impair’d fortune, after the same manner that I first got it; but then consider what a small matter is sufficient to keep a superanuated grannum, past the pleasures of this life; warm cloathing and a few sugar-sops, what else can an old woman want, that is fit for nothing but to mumble over her prayers, or sit nodding in a chimney-corner like an old cat, when her company becomes as nauseous to all that are younger than herself, as a sober divine is to a prophane libertine? ”

“ It is this appearance of happy life which spreads a charm over every little group, with which Nature animates her scenery; and he who can look without interest on the young lamb, as it frolics around the bush, may gaze, indeed, on the magnificent landscape as it opens before him,—but it will be with an eye which looks languidly, and in vain, for pleasure which it cannot find. ”

“ You, like the Cameleon, can put on any colour, can turn vice into virtue, and virtue into vice, to deceive your masters; and under the specious pretence of religion can commit the greatest barbarities. But tho’ under the shelter of that reverend name, you think all your iniquities undiscovered, so you possess your prince with the abominable zeal of persecution; yet heaven sees and detests your hypocrisy, and even men at long-run, discover the cheat. Oh! ye unworthy enemies of virtue, whose only aim is to raise your own fortunes upon the ruin of others. How useful are you to the Devil? ”

“ In the eye, for example, how wide a scene is open to us, wherever our glance maybe turned?—woods, fields, mountains, rivers, the whole atmosphere of light, and that magnificent luminary, which converts into light the whole space through which it moves, as if incapable of existing but in splendour. The mere opening of our eyelid is like the withdrawing of a veil, which before covered the universe:—It is more; it is almost like saying to the universe, which had perished, Exist again! ”

“ And of all in the world, you have the least reason to leave it to a wife, that not only betrays the rights of your bed, prostituting herself and your honour to rascals; but shew’d at first so little respect and love for you, as to desire so unreasonable a thing, that you should cast off all the bonds of nature, and forsake your own children, which she could not but love, if she lov’d you: for you know the proverb, love me, love my dog. Having thus therefore shewn the villainy of your crimes, ’tis fit I proceed to your just punishment, for which you are sent hither. ”

“ It is to man, when he thinks upon his own beginning, as if he felt himself in a world of enchantment, amid the shades and flowers of which he had been wandering, unconscious of the time at which he entered it, or of the objects that are awaiting him, when he shall have arrived at the close of that path, whose windings still lead him forward,—and knowing little more, than that he is himself happy, and that the unknown Being, who has raised this magnificent scene around him, must be the Friend of the mortal, whom he has deigned to admit into it. ”

“ If we imagine all the innumerable flowers which nature pours out, like a tribute of incense to the God who is adorning her, again to be stripped, in a single moment, of their odour, though they were to retain all their bright diversities of colouring, it would seem as if they were deprived of a spirit which animates them,—how cold and dead would they instantly become,—and how much should we lose of that vernal joy, which renders the season of blossoms almost a new life to ourselves. ”

“ What a jocular answer you will make to the thin-jaw’d executioner, for every comedian ought to die with a jest in his mouth to preserve his memory, for if he makes not the audience laugh as he goes off the stage, he forfeits his character, and his fame dies with his body; therefore I would advise you to set your wits on work to prepare yourself, that as you have always liv’d by repeating other peoples wit, you may not make your exit like a fool, but show you have some remains of your own juvenile sparklings to oblige the world with at your last minute. ”

“ What attributes, of a Being so transcendent, may human reason presume to explore? and, What homage will be most suitable to his immensity, and our nothingness? Is it only for an existence of a few moments, in this passing scene, that he has formed us? or, Is there something within us, over which death has no power,—something, that prolongs and identifies the consciousness of all which we have done on earth, and that, after the mortality of the body, may yet be a subject of the moral government of God? ”

“ We have long hoped for the lucky minute, wherein we might shew the world the strength of our resolutions, and the constancy of our principles, and make those cowardly slaves know, who pretend an abhorrence to your past bravery, that we are the cocks, when we dare crow, that will make the lion tremble; we have at all times when we meet, an ax hung up in our club-room, in pia memoria of your sacred action: but had we the true weapon, as much as we hate popery, we should turn idolaters, and worship it much more than Roman Catholicks do their pictures. ”

“ If, when we are looking at the glittering firmament of suns in a winter night, any one of those distant orbs were to become as radiant as our own sun, which is itself but the star of our planetary system, there can be no question, that, like our sun on its rising, it would quench with its brilliancy, all those little glimmering lights, which would still shine on us, indeed, as before, but would shine on us without being perceived. ”

“ I AM sorry a mistress of a king should degenerate so much from that generosity which was always applauded as a virtue in us ladies, who, like the industrious beaver, do our business with our tails; for a woman of my quality to value money, looks mean and mercenary, and is becoming no body but an unmerciful miser, or a common strumpet; should I have plac’d an esteem upon the riches that was left me, the world might have suppos’d it was for the greediness of gain, that made me yield my favours; and what had I been better than Madam James, or Mrs. Knight of Drury-lane ”

“ It is to see the mind, in a great measure, as it is in nature, divested of every thing foreign, passing instantly from thought to thought, from sensation to sensation, in almost endless variety of states, and differing as completely from that cumbrous representation of it, which philosophers are fond of representing to us, as the planets revolving freely in the immense space of our solar system, differ from those mimic orbs, which, without any principle of motion in themselves, are, as it were, dragged along, in the complex mechanism of our orreries. ”

“ Time, in short, is to our conception, a series in constant onward progress, and cannot be conceived by us, but as a progressive series, of which our separate feelings are parts; the remembrance of the events of our life, whenever we take any distant retrospect of them, being like the remembrance of the space, which we have traversed in a journey,—an indistinct continuity of length, as truly divisible, in our conception, into the separate events which we remember, as the space, which we remember to have traversed, into its separate variety of scenes. ”

“ But politeness itself, in all its most important respects,—indeed in every respect, in which it is to be separated from the mere fluctuating and arbitrary forms and ceremonies of the month or year,—is nothing more than knowledge of the human mind directing general benevolence. It is the art of producing the greatest happiness, which, in the mere external courtesies of life, can be produced, by raising such ideas or other feelings in the minds of those with whom we are conversant, as will afford the most pleasure, and averting, as much as possible, every idea which may lead to pain. ”

“ We have already formed,—spontaneously, and without the aid of any one,—our little system of physical science, and have, in truth, enriched ourselves with acquisitions, far more important than any which we are afterwards to form, with all the mature vigour of our faculties, and all the splendid aids of traditionary philosophy,—at a time, when we seem scarcely capable of more than of breathing and moving, and taking our aliment, and when the faculties, that leave us so much invaluable knowledge, are to leave us no knowledge of the means, by which we have acquired it. ”

“ To these high capacities of our being, the subjects, which can exercise our powers and feelings, however distant in time or place, are as it were everlastingly present,—like that mysterious eternal now, of which theologians speak,—in which past, present, and future are considered, as, in every moment of every age, alike visible to the omniscient glance of the Divinity. We love the virtues, of which we read, with the same sort of emotion, with which we love the virtues that are mingling with us in the present hour. ”

“ Is mere grief, for example, or mere astonishment, to be referred to our intellectual or to our active powers? I do not speak of the faculties which they may or may not call into action; but of the feelings themselves, as present phenomena or states of the mind. And, in whatsoever manner we may define the term active, is the mind more active, when it merely desires good and fears evil, when it looks with esteem on virtue, and with indignation, or disgust, and contempt on vice, than when it pursues a continued train of reasoning, or fancy, or historical investigation? ”

“ Though we know mind, then only relatively, in the series of feelings, of which we are conscious, as we know matter relatively in the series of phenomena, which it exhibits to our observation, we have, in this relative knowledge, subjects worthy of the contemplation of beings permitted, in these shadowings of a higher power, to trace some faint image of the very majesty which formed them. Even of the humblest mind, as we have seen, the various affections, sensitive, intellectual, and moral, that arise in it as affections of our common nature, are truly admirable ”

“ To dissipate this imaginary aggregate of our own creation, and to show us those separate bodies which occupy its space, and are all that nature created, is the great office of the analytic art of Chemistry, which does for us only what the microscope does, that enables us to see the small objects which are before us at all times, without our being able to distinguish them. When a chemist tells us, that glass, which appears to us one uniform substance, is composed of different substances, he tells us, what, with livelier perceptive organs, we might have known, without a single experiment ”

“ A few phrases of Aristotle achieved a much more extensive and lasting conquest, and are, perhaps, even at this moment, exercising no small sway on the very minds which smile at them with scorn, and which, in tracing the extent of their melancholy influence on the progress of science, in centuries that are past, are unconscious that they are describing and lamenting prejudices, of which they are themselves still, in a great measure, the slaves. How many truths are there, of which we are ignorant, merely because one man lived! ”

“ Indeed, so truly prior and paramount is it to mere reasoning, that the very notion of reasoning necessarily involves the belief of our identity as admitted. To reason, is to draw a conclusion from some former proposition; and how can one truth be inferred from another truth, unless the mind, which admits the one, be the mind, which admitted the other? In its order, as much as in its importance, it may be truly considered as the first of those truths which do not depend on reasoning, and as itself necessarily implied, perhaps in all, certainly in the greater number, of our other intuitions. ”

“ In what admits our analysis, and in what transcends it, we shall always find much that is truly wonderful in itself, and deserving of our profoundest admiration; and, even in the obscurest parts of the great field of mind, though we may see only dimly, and must, therefore, be cautious in inquiring, and fearful of pronouncing, we may yet, perhaps, be opening paths that are to lead to discovery, and, in the very darkness of our search, may perceive some gleams of that light, which, though now only dawning upon us, is to brighten on the inquirers of other ages. ”

“ We judge of the perspicuity and order of a discourse, by knowing the progress in which the mind, by the developement of truth after truth, may be made at last to see the full meaning of the most complex proposition. We judge of the beauty of impassioned poetry or eloquence, by knowing whether the figures, the images, the very feelings described, be such as, from our observation of the laws that regulate the internal series of changes in the mind, we know to be consistent with that state of emotion, in which a mind must exist that has been placed in the situation supposed. ”

“ Suppose that you see, at once, all the hours of the day, and all the seasons of the year,—a morning of spring and of autumn,—a night brilliant with stars, and a night obscure with clouds,—meadows, enamelled with flowers,—fields, waving with harvest,—woods, heavy with the frosts of winter,—you will then have a just notion of the spectacle of the universe. ”