BRACHYLOGIA;

OR,

ESSAYS, CRITICAL, SENTIMENTAL, MORAL, AND ORIGINAL.

ADDRESSED TO HIS PUPILS

BY AUGUSTUS TOMLINSON.

The irony in the preceding essays is often lost sight of in the
present. The illness of this great man, which happened while
composing these little gems, made him perhaps more in earnest
than when in robust health.--Editor's Note.

ON THE MORALITY TAUGHT BY THE RICH TO THE POOR.

As soon as the urchin pauper can totter out of doors, it is taught to
pull off its hat, and pull its hair to the quality. "A good little boy,"
says the squire; "there's a ha'penny for you." The good little boy glows
with pride. That ha'penny instils deep the lesson of humility. Now goes
our urchin to school. Then comes the Sunday teaching,--before church,
which enjoins the poor to be lowly, and to honour every man better off
than themselves. A pound of honour to the squire, and an ounce to the
beadle. Then the boy grows up; and the Lord of the Manor instructs him
thus: "Be a good boy, Tom, and I'll befriend you. Tread in the steps of
your father; he was an excellent man, and a great loss to the parish; he
was a very civil, hard-working, well-behaved creature; knew his station;
--mind, and do like him!" So perpetual hard labour and plenty of
cringing make the ancestral virtues to be perpetuated to peasants till
the day of judgment! Another insidious distillation of morality is
conveyed through a general praise of the poor. You hear false friends of
the people, who call themselves Liberals and Tories, who have an idea of
morals half chivalric, half pastoral, agree in lauding the unfortunate
creatures whom they keep at work for them. But mark the virtues the poor
are always to be praised for,--industry, honesty, and content. The
first virtue is extolled to the skies, because industry gives the rich
everything they have; the second, because honesty prevents an iota
of the said everything being taken away again; and the third, because
content is to hinder these poor devils from ever objecting to a lot so
comfortable to the persons who profit by it. This, my pupils, is the
morality taught by the rich to the poor!

EMULATION.

The great error of emulation is this: we emulate effects without
inquiring into causes. When we read of the great acti