Every man, born in civilized society, then irresistible." What! can virtue possesses conventional rights, which receive any lustre in the eyes of a it is necessary should be respected; wise man, from wealth and titles? but here let us beware how we confound servile degradation and baseness, with the uninfluenced dictates of the human heart suffered to speak out. Titles, pomp, money, splendor, are but the gewgaws of children intrinsically considered; but invest man's lordly form with these attributes, and lo! he walks forth with mien erect, and scornful glance, as though he owned a nature distinguished from the common herd. He looks down with ineffable contempt upon all who pursue a lower path in the great road of life; he exacts their homage; he is eager to quaff their adulation; he waits with impatience for the praises that are to resound in his ears; he swells and struts thro' existence, and at last makes his exit like the meanest individual. What! and am I, because his ancestors have heaped up wealth and bequeathed titles to him; because a silken ribbon graces his body; because trains of servants flutter round him and obey his nod; because he feeds upon costly fare, sleeps upon beds of down, and wantons unrestrained in nature's most profuse delights; am I, because scorn glances from his eye, because dignity swells and waits upon his steps, and all the trickery and the world's delusive colours hang in variegated glare about him; am I therefore to cringe, to bow, to bend the knee, to teach my tongue a softened tone, my eye a milder glow, and all my motions put into the shackles of restraint and form; am I to seek new phrases, ransack language for modest and obsequious words, bend my soul beneath its temper, and hush the feelings springing in my heart, lest they should sound too roughly in his courtly ears; am I to do all this, and merely to lull the bloated pride of one whom nature has pronounced my fellow worm? Forbid it Heaven! forbid it every manly sentiment of the soul! forbid it every honest goad of indignation that springs from such debasement of the human form! But it will perhaps be said, "when these extrinsic distinctions are united with virtue, their claim to respect is Does the good citizen, the amiable husband, the affectionate father, the steady friend, increase in virtue in proportion to his thousands, and the list of titles appended to his name? The man who snatches me from im pending destruction, shall I less warmly embrace him; shall I pour out less fervently my soul in thanks, accord. ing as he wears a laced or a ragged coat? Away with such philosophy! Virtue is in every sphere, august and noble! In every sphere she demands, and ought to obtain, our respect, our reverence, our adoration! It is a humiliating sight when we behold talents that adorn the human character, talents which are the admiration of the world, talents which are exerted in the cause of the best interests of society; it is truly humiliating to behold such powers allied with servility of mind. Yet, what is so common. Look back upon the annals of the world; contemplate its great men, whose works have been the delight, the instruction of succeeding ages; see, with what cringing, fawning complacency they hung about the powerful men of their age; how they have bartered the lustre of genius and of virtue, for the poor pleasure of popular applause read the letter of Bacon, after his fall, to his royal master; the name of Dryden flushes the cheek with indignation; Otway, with a most superior genius, sunk despicably low in the sordid sink of meanness and adulation; and Pope, whose writings breathe all the fire of independence, could become the most courtly little creature that ever haunted the tables of the great. Nor is this all. It appears that not even the consciousness of talent and of worth united has been able to preserve them from the contamination of vulgar minds. Admitted to the company of their patrons, they have adopted the obsequious timidity of a valet; they have trembled, they have stammered, they have equivocated, and at last lied, rather than presume to tell a duke or an earl that he was in error. Oh, shame to manhood! What is there so awe-inspiring in a name, that it should tempt a man to shuffle meanly between truth and falsehood; and even if the former at length speak out, that it should clothe itself in the garb of fear, that it should be disguised with a thousand supplicatory expressions, to shew that you are sensible of your great presumption in daring to contradict a man that is wrong. Among the few men of genius, whose characters will bear inspection in this respect, two stand out as remarkable exceptions: Dr. Johnson and Robert Burns. The former always preserved an independence giorious in itself, and in the highest degree honourable. What he wrote was for subsistence for the day that was passing over him; yet the pressure of poverty never impelled him to a mean action: he never employed his pen in the cause of vice; he ne ver flattered any patron, nor sought reward from any dedication; he never gratified envy by personal satire, nor did he conciliate esteem from the powerful, by exertions to crush the weak. Conscious of his integrity, and indignant at every species of vice, he preserved rigidly the character of an independent man, whether in society or in his writings. "To virtue only, and her friends a friend, "The world beside might murmur or commend." In virtue, secures the felicity of the breast, and gives to the actions of rectitude a superadded energy and respect. One of the greatest men now living has given it as his opinion, that Burns carried this haughtiness of mind rather too far; and that it imparted a degree of roughness and severity to his general conduct, which was un. pleasing. This last may be; but that he carried it too far, never surely can be asserted by any one who knows how to appreciate the dignity of human nature in general, and Burn's situation in particular. Burns was of humble birth: he had moved in a sphere of life, which is generally regarded by the superficial part of mankind with a degree of contempt; and, as giving them a title to a superior haughtiness of demeanor. knew this well: he knew too that even when the voice of his country had hailed him as a POET, there would not be wanting those who would still think it a condescension to visit him, and to mingle in his society. Burns therefore resolved, with a just magnanimity of soul, to make his countrymen respect him, not only as a POET, but as a MAN! Burns This is the independence of character I admire, aud would inculcate. It is the noblest characteristic of a rational being, and can alone lay claim among all the virtues of human nature to the praises which unmingled virtue should obtain. Without it,servility, baseness, and vice creep in, infect the soul, spread the ulcerous gangrene of corruption and degeneracy, and sink the man despicably low even in his own estimation. But, with it,-to employ the beautiful language of one who practised what he preached" It becomes our shield and buckler, our helmet and crown; the soul walks upright, nor stoops to the silken wretch, because he hath riches, nor pockets an abuse, because the hand which offers it wears a ring set with diamonds." Nor was Burns much inferior to Johnson in this first, and greatest ornament of genius and of man. my opinion, his most admired quality was that rigid independence, that jealous watchfulness of individual dignity, which bespeaks not only the man conscious of his rank in the scale of being; but the poet, who feels his superiority above the lucregifted, sordid, and supercilious nortal, placed by artificial society in a higher rank. I reverence him more for the steady independence of his mind, than for his genius; the latter might have belonged to any one as well as Robert Burns, and might have been allied to a soul imbued with baseness and servility; but the glorious path of independence, which he marked out for himself, was peculiarby his own; and while he towered WHEN I was at Gibraltar, in above the rest of mankind by his re A METHOD to write by CYPHER. year 1802, an officer, who splendent talents, he excelled them had served in Egypt, shewed me the no less by that quality which ennobles following singular method of writing UNIVERSAL MAG. VOL. VIII. by cypher, and permitted me to take from some foreign officer. If you a copy of it. It appeared to me one think it worthy of being inserted in of the most simple, yet the most in- your Magazine, it is much at your genious systems I ever saw of the service. kind. Whence it was that my friend got it I do not know; but, I believe, I remain, &c. g h X t u 1 y G a b C X d n : n s q r с X y 2 b u с E: q h g P ૨ R a b r a S b = t T १ r f 2 n K EXPLANATION. Each person who wishes to write to each other in cypher, to be furnished with an exact table as the one annexed, and a certain word for the key to be agreed upon between each, which we will here suppose to be Constantinople. For example, we will suppose that it is wished to write the following words, be on your guard, the enemy march to you. After having wrote what is to be put in cypher on a piece of paper, and the key word on the top of it, I begin thus: The first letter of the word, CI look for in the table down the first ment. Nothing in the moral world column, and along the square oppo- can be indifferent to it: the gold must site to I look for the first letter, b, be taken as it is found, mingled with of what I wish to write, and I find rubbish, sand, and baser metal: it the lettern, which I set down as the must be refined in the intellectual first letter of what I wish to write. crucible; the dross must be separated You must observe here, it is of no and rejected, and afterwards it must be signification whether you find the let- worked into taste, elegance, and reter either above or under the dotted finement. The united efforts of the line; if above, you take the letter un- chemist and the artisan must be called der it; if under, the letter above it. into action; and the utmost skill of Having done this, I proceed to the both must be diligently employed, second letter of my word, O, in the before the object of their labours be first column, and then find the se- dismissed from their hands. cond letter of what I wish to write, Fully aware of this (which is at e, and under it I find the letter y, least one step towards its execution), which I annex to the letter n already I was pondering in my elbow chair found-thus, ny being the first word upon the progress of my undertaking, of what I want to write. And thus I and the parts of which it will be comproceed through the whole, going on posed, when the powers of sleep overregularly with my word, and when fi- came me; I insensibly fell into a nished I recommence again with the first letter C. To make the deception greater, the letter & may sometimes be made by a figure of 6, and that of g by a figure of 9; and no attention must be paid to the manner of stopping, or the number of lines it may contain. Thus what I wish to write will stand as fellows: ny gi 9666 pбsmz ity ziuzd puluo md mh6. slumber; the pen dropped from my hand; and, in this situation, the following dream presented itself to my mind. I was, methought, transported into the middle of a spacious plain, thro' which ran several paths. At one extremity a lofty hill began to ascend, the lower part of which was extremely irregular, steep, and slippery; but near the middle it became more smooth and easy, and so continued As soon as the other receives the to the top, where might be seen a above, having his table and the key magnificent structure, which seemed word Constantinople before him, he to tower into the skies. To the right immediately looks in the first column and left of this plain there were other for the letter C, and in the square op- hills surmounted by other edifices posite for the letter n of the writ- and on these I beheld crowds without ing, and either over or under it, as number toiling to gain the ascent. the dotted line may make it, he will Some commenced with a steady find the first letter of what he wishes solemn pace; they made, to be sure, to decypher; thus opposite to C, over but slow progress, yet they had few n, will be found the letter b; and so slips; while others, who flew rapidly to the second, as opposite to O, over at the outset, looking with scorn upon y, is the letter e, which joined makes those they left behind, and with eager le, the first word of the intelligence, ness towards those who were before, and thus proceed until the whole is decyphered. This mode is rather slow until used to it, but very safe, and may be used with great success. THE CONTEMPLATIST, No 11. were soon stopped in their career; they lost their ground; they rolled down with incredible celerity into an immense abyss which surrounded the hill, and which was covered with a thick vapour, and were seen to rise no more. A third set sprung forward with astonishing velocity, and gained HE mind of a periodical Essayist at one moment the middle of the hill, can expect but few intervals but here they stopped; and though of rest. It must be perpetually on they did not recoil, yet they in vain the alert to seize new objects for in- endeavoured to make further progress; vestigation, and new topics for amuse- indeed I observed that very few reach TH Dulces somui-Virg, ed the summit; the greater part were was a degree of vivacity in her coun stationary between the bottom and the tenance, though chastened by a precentre; some passed this last, and re- vailing sobriety of look. Her eyes posed with apparent satisfaction a few glanced from side to side with rapipaces above it; a small number re- dity; a beam of joy sometimes played clined upon the very top, and seemed across her features when she looked by their actions to encourage those upon TRUTH and read in her face a who were but a short distance be- tacit approbation. She carried in her neath to continue their labour. I hand a shield of burnished silver, emcould not help observing with astonish- bossed with groupes of antic figures: ment, that a few who appeared to re- in the centre was engraven the word pose with contented dignity at almost Wir, surrounded by emeralds, topaz, the very bottom, sprung, in an in- sapphires, and other precious stones. stant, beyond the middle, and some- The third figure was by far the most times even reached the most elevated singular, and the most difficult to depoint. I saw many who strove to scribe. There was a comic archness hurl others down, but losing their in her looks that spoke a volume; her balance they were themselves preci- face was continually brightened by a pitated into the gulph below. On smile; her motions were full of airi every side indeed I beheld strife and ness and vigour; her step was elastic; contention; and a confused noise of her gestures often grotesque and lu vociferous voices struck my ear.- dicrous; her drapery was profusely Having contemplated for some time garnished with dazzling ornaments, this scene of confusion, I directed my which struck with such splendour attention again towards the first hill, upon the sight as to prevent it from and I could not conceive why this dwelling long upon her: it frequently should be neglected (for I did not turned away and reposed upon the perceive one individual near it), when sober majesty of TRUTH or the chaste it appeared to be in many respects vivacity of WIT. Sometimes, when much more interesting and more her actions were so preposterous as to beautiful than the other. While I excite disgust rather than merriment, was thus busied in fruitless contem- a sudden effulgence from her vestplation, I beheld three majestic fe- ments threw a false glare round her males approaching towards me.- which concealed her irregularities, Their port was stately, their looks and when this lustre had subsided, commanding, and their motions grace- she appeared again in all her native ful. But there was a striking dif- attractions. On her left arm she bore ference between them; and, as they a shield, whose shape defied defiapproached nearer, I observed more nition; it was grotesquely ornamentleisurely their discrepancies. ed, and I could perceive in the middle the word HUMOUR engraven in a strange fashion, In the looks of the first there was a severe and awful majesty that inspired feelings of solemnity even while I stood still with awe as I gazed it captivated. The steady glance of upon them. They approached within her eye seemed to pierce me through; a few paces of me, and I shrunk her features were composed and se- back appalled. TRUTH stretched forth date; her steps slow, direct, and her hand with a bewitching smile and steady; her foim was athletic, and an air of kind encouragement: still I there was a certain ineffable grace hesitated, while WIT, advancing on which played about her countenance the other side, seized me by the hand that made her irresistibly charming. and gently led me forward. They In her right hand she carried a wand, were silent, and astonishment forand in her left a massy shield, on bad me to utter a word: we prowhich was inscribed in letters of living ceeded slowly along, while HUMOUR gold the word TRUTH. gamboled with a thousand wild frolics before us. We had gained the foot of the neglected hill, and I was struck at the facility with which, thus supported, I passed over the awful chasms and immense obstructions that seemed The next figure had less dignity, but equal solemnity in her appearShe leaned on TRUTH for her support, and seemed indeed unable to walk steadily without her, There ance. |