ing mistress; she
usurps authority over all the plans and actions of life; imperceptibly
consuming and destroying both passions and virtues.

267.--A quickness in believing evil without having sufficiently examined
it, is the effect of pride and laziness. We wish to find the guilty, and
we do not wish to trouble ourselves in examining the crime.

268.--We credit judges with the meanest motives, and yet we desire our
reputation and fame should depend upon the judgment of men, who are all,
either from their jealousy or pre-occupation or want of intelligence,
opposed to us--and yet 'tis only to make these men decide in our favour
that we peril in so many ways both our peace and our life.

269.--No man is clever enough to know all the evil he does.

270.--One honour won is a surety for more.

271.--Youth is a continual intoxication; it is the fever of reason.

["The best of life is but intoxication."--{Lord Byron, } Don Juan{,
Canto II, stanza 179}. In the 1st Edition, 1665, the maxim finishes
with--"it is the fever of health, the folly of reason."]

272.--Nothing should so humiliate men who have deserved great praise, as
the care they have taken to acquire it by the smallest means.

273.--There are persons of whom the world approves who have no merit
beyond the vices they use in the affairs of life.

274.--The beauty of novelty is to love as the flower to the fruit; it
lends a lustre which is easily lost, but which never returns.

275.--Natural goodness, which boasts of being so apparent, is often
smothered by the least interest.

276.--Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as
the wind will blow out a candle, and blow in a fire.

277.--Women often think they love when they do not love. The business of
a love affair, the emotion of mind that sentiment induces, the natural
bias towards the pleasure of being loved, the difficulty of refusing,
persuades them that they have real passion when they have but
flirtation.

["And if in fact she takes a {"}Grande Passion{"}, It is a very serious
thing indeed: Nine times in ten 'tis but caprice or fashion, Coquetry,
or a wish to take the lead, The pride of a mere child with a new sash
on. Or wish to make a rival's bosom bleed: But the {Tenth} instance will
be a tornado, For there's no saying what they will or may do." {--Lord
Byron, }Don Juan, canto xii. stanza 77.]

278.--What makes us so often discontented with those who