their own admiration and undoing.  He is an excellent founder, and will melt down a leaden fool and cast him into what form he pleases.  He is like a pike in a pond, that lives by rapine, and will sometimes venture on one of his own kind, and devour a knave as big as himself.  He will swallow a fool a great deal bigger than himself, and, if he can but get his head within his jaws, will carry the rest of him hanging out at his mouth, until by degrees he has digested him all.  He has a hundred tricks to slip his neck out of the pillory without leaving his ears behind.  As for the gallows, he never ventures to show his tricks upon the high-rope for fear of breaking his neck.  He seldom commits any villainy but in a legal way, and makes the law bear him out in that for which it hangs others.  He always robs under the wizard of law, and picks pockets with tricks in equity.  By his means the law makes more knaves than it hangs, and, like the Inns-of-Court, protects offenders against itself.  He gets within the law and disarms it.  His hardest labour is to wriggle himself into trust, which if he can but compass his business is done, for fraud and treachery follow as easily as a thread does a needle.  He grows rich by the ruin of his neighbours, like grass in the streets in a great sickness.  He shelters himself under the covert of the law, like a thief in a hemp-plot, and makes that secure him which was intended for his destruction.

APPENDIX.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Wrote “The Character of the Happy Warrior” in 1806.  It was suggested by the death of Nelson at Trafalgar on the 21st of October 1805.  Wordsworth did not connect the poem with the name of Nelson because there was a stain upon his public life, in his relations with Lady Hamilton, that clouded the ideal.  The poet said that in writing he thought much of his true-hearted sailor-brother who, as Captain of an Indiaman, had been drowned in the wreck of his ship off the Bill of Portland on the 5th of February 1805, his body not being found until the 20th of March.

CHARACTER OF THE HAPPY WARRIOR.

   Who is the happy Warrior?  Who is he
   That every man in arms should wish to he? 
   —­It is the generous spirit, who, when brought
   Among the tasks of real life, hath wrought
   Upon the plan that pleased his boyish thought: 
   Whose high endeavours are an inward light
   That makes the path before him always bright: 
   Who, with a natural instinct to discern
   What knowledge can perform, is diligent to learn;
   Abides by this resolve, and stops not there,
   But makes his moral being his prime care;
   Who, doomed to go in company with Pain,
   And Fear, and Bloodshed—­miserable train!—­
   Turns his necessity to glorious gain;
   In face of these doth exercise a power
   Which is our human nature’s