etain the inoffensiveness described in
the beginning of this Essay.

How comes it then that our nature labours under so bitter an aspersion?
We have been described as cunning, malicious and treacherous. Other
animals herd together for mutual convenience; and their intercourse with
their species is for the most part a reciprocation of social feeling
and kindness. But community among men, we are told, is that condition of
human existence, which brings out all our evil qualities to the face
of day. We lie in wait for, and circumvent each other by multiplied
artifices. We cannot depend upon each other for the truth of what is
stated to us; and promises and the most solemn engagements often seem
as if they were made only to mislead. We are violent and deadly in our
animosities, easily worked up to ferocity, and satisfied with scarcely
any thing short of mutilation and blood. We are revengeful: we lay up an
injury, real or imaginary, in the store-house of an undecaying memory,
waiting only till we can repay the evil we have sustained tenfold, at a
time when our adversary shall be lulled in unsuspecting security. We
are rapacious, with no symptom that the appetite for gain within us will
ever be appeased; and we practise a thousand deceits, that it may be
the sooner, and to the greater degree glutted. The ambition of man is
unbounded; and he hesitates at no means in the course it prompts him to
pursue. In short, man is to man ever the most fearful and dangerous foe:
and it is in this view of his nature that the king of Brobdingnag says
to Gulliver, "I cannot but conclude the bulk of your race to be the most
pernicious generation of little, odious vermin, that were ever suffered
to crawl upon the surface of the earth." The comprehensive faculties of
man therefore, and the refinements and subtlety of his intellect, serve
only to render him the more formidable companion, and to hold us up as a
species to merited condemnation.

It is obvious however that the picture thus drawn is greatly
overcharged, that it describes a very small part of our race, and that
even as to them it sets before us a few features only, and a partial
representation.

History--the successive scenes of the drama in which individuals play
their part--is a labyrinth, of which no man has as yet exactly seized
the clue.

It has long since been observed, that the history of the four great
monarchies, of tyrannies and free states, of chivalry and clanship, of