RESTRICTIVE VIRTUES.

I know, that all parsimony is of a quality approaching to unkindness;
and that (on some person or other) every reform must operate as a sort
of punishment. Indeed, the whole class of the severe and restrictive
virtues are at a market almost too high for humanity. What is worse,
there are very few of those virtues which are not capable of being
imitated, and even outdone, in many of their most striking effects, by
the worst of vices. Malignity and envy will carve much more deeply, and
finish much more sharply, in the work of retrenchment, than frugality
and providence. I do not, therefore, wonder that gentlemen have kept
away from such a task, as well from good-nature as from prudence.
Private feeling might, indeed, be overborne by legislative reason; and a
man of a longd-sighted and a strong-nerved humanity might bring himself,
not so much to consider from whom he takes a superfluous enjoyment, as
for whom in the end he may preserve the absolute necessaries of life.


LIBELLERS OF HUMAN NATURE.

I hope there are none of you corrupted with the doctrine taught by
wicked men for the worst purposes, and received by the malignant
credulity of envy and ignorance, which is, that the men who act upon the
public stage are all alike; all equally corrupt; all influenced by no
other views than the sordid lure of salary and pension. The thing I know
by experience to be false. Never expecting to find perfection in men,
and not looking for divine attributes in created beings, in my commerce
with my contemporaries, I have found much human virtue. I have seen not