like a beadle, and drank like a bell-ringer, be your memory
nevertheless honoured--not merely because you were a brave soldier, but
also because you revealed to your little nephew in petticoats the
sentiment of heroism! Pride and laziness had made you almost
insupportable, O my Uncle Victor!--but a great heart used to beat under
those frogs upon your coat. You always used to wear, I now remember, a
rose in your button-hole. That rose which you allowed, as I now have
reason to believe, the shop-girls to pluck for you--that, large,
open-hearted flower, scattering its petals to all the winds, was the
symbol of your glorious youth. You despised neither absinthe nor
tobacco; but you despised life. Neither delicacy nor common sense could
have been learned from you, captain; but you taught me, even at an age
when my nurse had to wipe my nose, a lesson of honour and
self-abnegation that I will never forget.

THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS
[Sidenote: _Dean Swift_]

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us
love one another.

* * * * *

The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies,
prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

* * * * *

When a true genius appeareth in the world you may know him by this
infallible sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

* * * * *

Although men are accused of not knowing their own weakness, yet perhaps
as few know their own strength. It is in men as in soils, where
sometimes there is a vein of gold, which the owner knows not of.

* * * * *

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion,
learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what
a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

* * * * *

The reason why so few marriages are happy is because young ladies spend
their time in making nets, not in making cages.

* * * * *

"He who does not provide for his own house," St. Paul says, "is worse
than an infidel." And I think, he who provides only for his own house is
just equal with an infidel.

* * * * *

An idle reason lessens the value of the good ones you gave before.

* * * *