I.-THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD
This axiom tains a principle of pensation which disposes us to admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to diaries and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular language, if we did not find brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour -- in the same vocabulary. The ic writers, with their poetical justice, have tributed not a little to mislead us upon this point. To see a hect fellow exposed aen upoage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some peoples share of animal spirits is notoriously low aive. It has not strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no art of valour. The truest ce with them is that which is the least noisy and obtrusive. But front one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer of real life, and his fiden the theory quickly vanishes. Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest inoffensive deportment does not [p 253] necessarily imply valour; her does the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hi wanted modesty -- we do not mean him of Clarissa -- but who ever doubted his ce? Even the poets -- upon whom this equitable distribution of qualities should be most binding -- have thought it agreeable to nature to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks of driving armies singly before him -- and does it. Tom Brown had a shrewder insight into this kind of character thaher of his predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero a sort of dimidiate preeminence: -- " Bully Dawson kicked by half the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true distributive justice.
II. -- THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS
The weakest part of mankind have this saying o in their mouth. It is the trite solation administered to the easy dupe, when he has been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of it will do the owner no good. But the rogues of this world -- the prudenter part of them, at least -- know better; and, if the observation had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distins of the fluctuating and the perma. "Lightly e, lightly go," is a proverb, which they very well afford to leave, when they leave little else, to the losers. They do not always find manot by rapine or chiery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have it or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thiefs hand that grasps it. Church land, alieo lay uses, was formerly denouo have this slippery quality. But some portions of it somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to postpohe prophecy of refuo a late posterity.