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THE GREEN BAG
unius libri; but if His Grace had, with prophetic vision, written this doom with reference to the literary out-put of the present day, possibly we should have had to consider the justice of quoting the afore said saw against him. The avaricious and dishonest Verres, im mortalized as an example of official cor ruption by the glowing rhetoric of Cicero, was also an unreasoning extremist. Be fore him all the protagonists of Tammany Hall ethics pale their insignificant fires. "There was no silver vessel," says his accuser, "no Corinthian or Delian plate, no jewel or pearl, nothing made of gold or ivory, no statue of marble or brass or ivory, no picture whether painted or embroidered, that he did not seek out, that he did not inspect, that, if he liked it, he did not take away." Punning upon his name, Cicero calls him "the drag-net (everriculum) of Sicily." It is his extremely ludicrous and abortive attempt to steal the colossal bronze statue of the most illustrious of the Greek heroes from his temple at Agrigentum that constitutes "the thirteenth labor of Her cules." If Archimedes could have fur nished him with a sufficient fulcrum (irov o-Tol) to move it, Verres would have stolen the earth.
A moment ago, I mentioned a literary judgment which was not mindful of the vice of extremes. Here is another. In his Table-Talk, Hazlitt observes with much truth and point: "How much time and talents have been wasted in theological con troversy, in law, in politics, in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in find ing out the art of making gold." But how far he falls from the plane of moderation and the judicial quality of the true critic, when he adds:
"What actual benefit do we reap from the writings of a Laud or a Whitgift, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux' Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St. Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Vattel, or from the more literal, but equally learned
and unprofitable, labors of Scaliger, Cardan and Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes? What would the world lose if they were committed to the flames to morrow? Or are they not already 'gone to the vault of all the Capulets'?" Let us take three of the best-known names in this group so airily dismissed as a prey to dumb forgetfulness. Think you, 0 gentle reader, that the Confessions of the great Bishop of Hippo will cease to be read so long as man's heart beats true to its primal sympathies? I trow not. And it is not Hazlitt, with his more or less precipitate, though undoubtedly brilliant, Table-Talk, that figuratively inhabits " the vaults of all the Capulets " to-day rather than the great publicists Puffendorf and Vattel, whose respective works De Jure Naturae et Gentium, and Droit des gens, ou Principes de la lot naturelle, are anatomical elements in the living body of International Law? How instantaneously does Carlyle swim into our ken when we contemplate the lack of moderation of many of our great men, even though it be but a spot on the sun of genius. (In Carlyle's case, sad to say paren thetically, the spot is often more respon sible for heat than the sun itself.) His "mostly fools" characterization of his Brit ish compatriots was bad enough; but the apex of his intemperate rhetoric is touched in his fling at their legal institutions in the essay from which the following " Pig pro positions " are taken — "8. 'Have you Law and Justice in Ptgdom?' Pigs of observation have discerned that there is, or was once supposed to be, a thing called justice. Undeniably at least there is a sentiment in Pig-nature called indignation, revenge, etc., which, if one Pig provoke another, comes out in a more or less destructive manner: hence laws are necessary, amazing quantities of laws. For quarreling is attended with loss of blood, of life, at any rate with frightful effusion of the general stock of Hog's wash, and ruin
