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began his inquiries on colours by examining soap bubbles; ascribing their diversity of colours to the difference in the thickness of the sides of the bubbles, which perform the office of a prism*.

Communities, as well as individuals, are perpetually bubbling themselves; all the while esteeming themselves the wisest of men; and I cannot help thinking the members of the Constituent Assembly of France to have been guilty of this folly. Not when they declared themselves ineligible to be ministers of the crown until two years had elapsed after their sitting as legislators; but when they voted their own incapability of being elected members of that National Council, which should succeed the Constituent Assembly. The evils that ensued who does not know?

Were a murderer, pursued by officers of justice, to enter my house and solicit protection, am I not bound to deliver him up? He, who disdains the law, must suffer by the law. He cannot be permitted to take it up, and set it down, just as he pleases. Placing himself, then, under the protection of the Bellerophon, what right had Napoleon to suppose, that he could be esteemed in any other light than as an enemy or as a public nuisance? By the invasion of France he had, voluntarily, placed himself out of the law of nations. He seems to have thought that he alone was privileged to say, Wherever I place my foot, hic domus, hæc 6 patria.'

He attempted to justify his invasion on the ground,

* For M. Gregoire's opinion, see Mémoire sur les Couleurs des bulles de savon.

that scarcely one of the articles of the treaty of Fontainbleau, guaranteed by Austria, Russia, Prussia, and France, by the signatures of Metternich, Nesselrode, Hardenberg, and Talleyrand, had been observed; and yet he frankly acknowledged to the Count Las Cases, that, on signing that treaty, he had chosen Elba, because it was a spot, whence he could take advantage of any mistakes that might be committed; and whence he could easily return to France, should circumstances permit!

The probability of this invasion I foretold many months before it happened; and I did so on the ground of a very small, but, I think, very significant circumstance: viz., on being informed, that Napoleon had taken for his crest an eagle, with its head under its wing.

Being still an emperor, he had a right to an eagle for his crest; but taking that, with its head under its wing, was tacitly telling the world in general, and his partisans in particular, that his title to France was not dead, but sleeping.

Men often fall from the eminence to which they have climbed, by the same errors of principle by which they climbed; and the most effectual way to be bubbled, as it is significantly called, is to believe ourselves beyond the reach of imposition.

Being, a short time since, at Cambridge, a gentleman, in the coffee-room at the Rose Inn, read me the following quotation he had made from a book he had been reading the day before:- Men are, every jot, as easily 'imposed upon as birds, beasts, or fishes; while the

eagerness of our appetites suspends the exercise of our

6 reason: a treat, a woman, or a bottle, being the same

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thing to us, that a worm, a gudgeon, a grain of corn, or a piece of flesh is to those animals. We snap at the 'bait without ever dreaming of the hook, the trap, or " the snare, that goes along with it.'

Who is so wise as never to have done this? Who so unwise as never to confess it?

CCXV.

MEN OF ARTIFICE, ETC.

THE Genoese are given to trick; the Spaniards to artifice; Frenchmen to finesse; and the Italians to stratagem; but a Chinese, they say, can only be cheated by a Chinese :

Yet these are they, the world pronounce as wise!' One man alludes; a second refers; a third suggests; a fourth hints. One will affect; another will pretend;

others assume.

This desires to appear better than he is; and builds on imitating manners, vices, and sometimes virtues. This pretends to what is above his reach, his capacity, or his condition.

'By nought their prudence, but in getting known,
And all their courage in deceiving shown.'

One man exclaims, as it were, to all mankind,—“ Ye 6 are knaves!' another, Ye are fools!'

What are

these but superficial knaves and fools themselves?

* Vide Rousseau's reasoning upon this. Emilius, vol. ii., p. 73.

In vain the shallow streamlet flows

Its sandy bed to hide ;

The clear, transparent bosom shows

Each weed beneath the tide *.'

Knaves? They are often,-fortunately often,-betrayed, not only by their own associates, but even by their own wishes and maxims.

CCXVI.

WHO DESPISE THOSE THAT PAVE THE WAY.

6

IT is common to despise our masters. When we have been put into the way, already paved and lighted, who can fail to find the end of his journey? Your 'highness,' said Columbus, may believe me, that the 'earth is far from being so large as the vulgar admit. 'I was seven years at your royal court, and during seven years was told that my enterprize was a folly. 'Now, that I have opened the way, tailors and shoe'makers ask the privilege of going to discover new 'lands.'

Tailors and shoemakers may justly ask leave to go in search of new lands; all we desire of them is, not to calumniate or despise those, who have pointed out to them the quarter of the world, where the new lands lie.

*Metastasio; Artaxerxes; Hoole.

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CCXVII.

WHO CAN RULE A STATE, BUT NOT A HOUSE.

GROTIUS lays it down as a rule, in his political maxims, that no one can rule a kingdom who cannot manage a province; nor a province, unless he can order a city: nor a city, unless he can regulate a village; nor a village, if he cannot guide a family; nor even a family, unless he can govern himself.

That men, however, can govern states, and yet not govern their own families, is very certain; and we may give for examples, Augustus, Marcus Antoninus, Charlemagne; nay, a multitude of both kings and ministers.

CCXVIII.

CITIZENS OF THE WORLD.

'Et consilio, et voce, et etiam vultu.'

THE Marquis la Fayette wrote thus to a friend * :May every popular speaker and writer have a mind 'fixed with a pure love of freedom, disentangled from 'every personal motive, either of vanity or ambition; 'wholly devoted to the rights and happiness of man'kind.'

A patriot, as the name implies, thinks only of his country; a true citizen of the world is of no country. He regards mankind in the mass; thinks only of man, not of particular men, or of particular communities of All to him are sons or daughters, brothers,

men.

VOL. II.

*Thavaniac, Dec. 10, 1791.

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