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CHAPTER XLV.

The Honorable Mr. Boyle.

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THE celebrated Robert Boyle, the chemist, was accounted in his days a sort of perfection of a man, especially in all respects intellectual, moral, and religious. This excellent person was in the habit of moralizing upon everything that he did or suffered; such as, "Upon his manner of giving meat to his dog,"—" Upon his horse stumbling in a very fair way,"-" Upon his sitting at ease in a coach that went very fast," &c. Among other Reflections, is one "Upon a fish's struggling after having swallowed the hook." It amounts to this: that at the moment when the fish thinks himself about to be most happy, the hook "does so wound and tear his tender gills, and thereby puts him into such restless pain, that, no doubt, he wishes the hook, bait and all, were out of his torn jaws again. Thus," says he, men who do what they should not, to obtain any sensual desires," &c., &c. Not a thought comes over him as to his own part in the business, and what he ought to say of himself for tearing the jaws and gills to indulge his own appetite for excitement. Take also the following: Fifth Section-Reflection I. Killing a crow (out of window) in a hog's trough, and immediately tracing the ensuing reflection with a pen made of one of his quills.—Long and patiently did I wait for this unlucky crow, wallowing in the sluttish trough (whose sides kept him a great while out of the reach of my gun), and gorging himself with no less greediness than the very swinish proprietaries of the feast, till at length, my no less unexpected than fatal shot in a moment struck him down; and turning the scene of his delight into that of his pangs, made him abruptly alter his note, and change his triumphant chaunt into a dismal and tragic noise. This method is not unusual to divine justice towards brawny and incorrigible sinners," &c., &c. Thus the crow, for eating his dinner, is a rascal worthy to be shot by the Honorable Mr. Robert Boyle

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before the latter sits down to his own; while the said Mr. Boyle, instead of contenting himself with being a gentleman in search of amusement at the expense of birds and fish, is a representative of Divine Justice.

We laugh at this wretched moral pedantry now, and deplore the involuntary hard-heartedness which such mistakes in religion tended to produce; but in how many respects should it not make us look about ourselves, and see where we fall short of an enlargement of thinking?

23*

CHAPTER XLVI.

Superfine Breeding.

THERE is an anecdote in Aulus Gellius (Noctes Atticæ, lib. 10, cap. vi.) which exhibits, we think, one of the highest instances of what may be called polite blackguardism, that we remember to have read. The fastidiousness, self-will, and infinite resentment against a multitude of one's fellow-creatures for presuming to come in contact with our importance, are truly edifying; and to complete the lesson, this extraordinary specimen of the effect of superfine breeding and blood is handed down to us in the person of a lady. Her words might be thought to have been a bad joke; and bad enough it would have been; but the sense that was shown of them proves them to have been very gravely regarded.

Claudia, the daughter of Appius Cæcus, in coming away from a public spectacle, was much pressed and pushed about by the crowd; upon which she thus vented her impatience :-"What should I have suffered now, and how much more should I have been squeezed and knocked about, if my brother Publius Claudius had not had his ships destroyed in battle, with all that heap of men? I should have been absolutely jammed to death! Would to heaven my brother were alive again, and could go with another fleet to Sicily, and be the death of this host of people, who plague and pester one in this horrid manner!" *

For these words, "so wicked and so uncivic," says good old Gellius (tam improba ac tam incivilia) the Ædiles, Caius Fun

*"Quid me nunc factum esset, quantoque arctius pressiusque conflictata essem, si P. Claudius frater meus navali prælio classem navium cum ingenti civium numero non perdidisset? certè quidem majore nunc copiâ populi oppressa intercidissem. Sed utinam, inquit, reviviscat frater, aliamque classem in Siciliam ducat, atque istam multitudinem eat, quæ me malè aunc miseram convexavit."

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danus and Tiberius Sempronius, got the lady fined in the sum of twenty-five thousand pounds brass. There is a long account, in Livy, of the speech which they made to the people in reply to the noble families that interceded for her. It is very indig nant. Claudia herself confessed her words, and does not appear to have joined in the intercession. They are not related at such length by Livy, as by Aulus Gellius. He merely makes her wish that her brother were alive to take out another fleet. But he shows his sense of the ebullition by calling it a dreadful imprecation; and her rage was even more gratuitous, according to his account; for he describes her as coming from the shows in a chariot.

Insolence and want of feeling appear to have been hereditary in this Appian family: which gives us also a strong sense of their want of capacity; otherwise a disgust at such manners must have been generated in some of the children. They were famous for opposing every popular law, and for having kept the commons as long as possible out of any share in public honors and government. The villain Appius Claudius, whose story has been made still more familiar to the public by the tragedy of Mr. Knowles, was among its ancestors. Appius Cæcus, or the Blind, the father of Claudia, though he constructed the celebrated Appian Way and otherwise benefited the city, was a very unpo. pular man, wilful, haughty, and lawless. He retained possession of the Censorship beyond the limited period. It is an instance perhaps of his unpopularity, as well as of the supersti. tion of the times, that having made a change in one of the priestly offices, and become blind some years afterwards, the Romans attributed it to the vengeance of heaven; an opinion which Livy repeats with great devotion, calling it a warning against innovations in religion. It had no effect, however, upon Claudius the brother, whose rashness furnished the pious Romans with a similar example to point at. Before an engagement with the Carthaginians, the Sacred Chickens were consulted, and because they would not peck and furnish him with a good omen, he ordered them to be thrown into the sea. "If they won't eat,' says he, "let 'em drink." The engagement was one of the worst planned and the worst fought in the world; but the men

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were dispirited by the Consul's irreverent behavior to the chickens; and his impiety shared the disgrace with his folly. Livy represents him as an epitome of all that was bad in his family; proud, stubborn, unmerciful, though full of faults himself, and wilful and precipitate to a degree of madness. This was the battle, of which his sister wished to see a repetition. It cost the Romans many ships sunk, ninety-three taken, and according to the historian, the miraculous loss of eight thousand men killed and twenty thousand taken prisoners, while the Carthaginians lost not a ship or a man.

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