hts." Had the populace been able to repeat that
profound maxim, all would have gone perfectly well with them. No
tyranny, no vexation, no oppression, no care, no sorrow, could have
existed in the world. This would have cured them like a charm for the
tooth-ache. But the lowest wretches, in their most ignorant state, were
able at all times to talk such stuff; and yet at all times have they
suffered many evils and many oppressions, both before and since the
republication by the National Assembly of this spell of healing potency
and virtue. The enlightened Dr. Ball, when he wished to rekindle the
lights and fires of his audience on this point, chose for the test the
following couplet:--

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

Of this sapient maxim, however, I do not give him for the inventor. It
seems to have been handed down by tradition, and had certainly become
proverbial; but whether then composed or only applied, thus much must be
admitted, that in learning, sense, energy, and comprehensiveness, it is
fully equal to all the modern dissertations on the equality of mankind:
and it has one advantage over them,--that it is in rhyme.[23]

There is no doubt but that this great teacher of the rights of man
decorated his discourse on this valuable text with lemmas, theorems,
scholia, corollaries, and all the apparatus of science, which was
furnished in as great plenty and perfection out of the dogmatic and
polemic magazines, the old horse-armory of the Schoolmen, among whom the
Rev. Dr. Ball was bred, as they can be supplied from the new arsenal at
Hackney. It was, no doubt, disposed with all the adjutancy of
definition and division, in which (I speak it with submission) the old
marshals were as able as the modern martinets. Neither can we deny that
the philosophic auditory, when they had once obtained this knowledge,
could never return to their former ignorance, or after so instructive a
lecture be in the same state of mind as if they had never heard it.[24]
But these poor people, who were not to be envied for their knowledge,
but pitied for their delusion, were not reasoned, (that was impossible,)
but beaten, out of their lights. With their teacher they were delivered
over to the lawyers, who wrote in their blood the statutes of the land,
as harshly, and in the same sort of ink, as they and their teachers had
written the rights of man.

Our doctors of the day are not so fond of quoting the o