who have perhaps loved the most honestly and the most humanly; these yet
render Tibullus pathetic, and Ovid a master over tender affections; and
these, above all, make that irresistible and all-touching inspiration
which subdues the romantic, the calculating, the old, the young, the
courtier, the peasant, the poet, the man of business, in the glorious
love-poetry of Robert Burns.




THE GREAT ENTAILED.

The great inheritance of man is a commonwealth of blunders. One race
spend their lives in botching the errors transmitted to them by another;
and the main cause of all political, that is, all the worst and most
general, blunders is this,--the same rule we apply to individual cases we
will not apply to public. All men consent that swindling for a horse is
swindling,--they punish the culprit and condemn the fault. But in a
State there is no such unanimity. Swindling, Lord help you! is called by
some fine name; and cheating grows grandiloquent, and styles itself
"Policy." In consequence of this there is always a battle between those
who call things by their right names and those who pertinaciously give
them the wrong ones. Hence all sorts of confusion. This confusion
extends very soon to the laws made for individual cases; and thus in old
States, though the world is still agreed that private swindling is
private swindling, there is the Devil's own difficulty in punishing the
swindling of the public. The art of swindling now is a different thing
to the art of swindling a hundred years ago; but the laws remain the
same. Adaptation in private cases is innovation in public; so, without
repealing old laws, they make new. Sometimes these are effectual, but