oung
gentlemen, this concluding maxim: Men are like lands; you will get
more by lavishing all your labour again and again upon the easy than by
ploughing up new ground in the sterile! Legislators,--wise, good, pious
men,--the Tom Thumbs of moral science, who make giants first, and
then kill them,--you think the above lessons villanous. I honour your
penetration. They are not proofs of my villany, but of your folly! Look
over them again, and you will see that they are designed to show that
while ye are imprisoning, transporting, and hanging thousands every day,
a man with a decent modicum of cunning might practise every one of those
lessons which seem to you so heinous, and not one of your laws could
touch him!

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,