Wherever there is war, there is misery and outrage; notwithstanding which, it is not only lawful to wish, but even a duty to pray for the success of one’s country.  And as to the neutralities, I really think the Russian virago an impertinent puss for meddling with us, and engaging half a score kittens of her acquaintance to scratch the poor old lion, who, if he has been insolent in his day, has probably acted no otherwise than they themselves would have acted in his circumstances and with his power to embolden them.

Though a Christian is not to be quarrelsome, he is not to be crushed.  Though he is but a worm before God, he is not such a worm as every selfish and unprincipled wretch may tread on at his pleasure.

St. Paul seems to condemn the practice of going to law.  “Why do ye not suffer wrong, etc.”  But if we look again we shall find that a litigious temper prevailed among the professors of that day.  Surely he did not mean, any more than his Master, that the most harmless members of society should receive no advantage of its laws, or should be the only persons in the world who should derive no benefit from those institutions without which society cannot subsist.

Tobacco was not known in the Golden Age.  So much the worse for the Golden Age.  This age of iron and lead would be insupportable without it; and therefore we may reasonably suppose that the happiness of those better days would have been much improved by the use of it.

No man was ever scolded out of his sins.  The heart, corrupt as it is, and because it is so, grows angry if it be not treated with some management and good manners, and scolds again.  A surly mastiff will bear perhaps to be stroked, though he will growl even under that operation, but, if you touch him roughly, he will bite.

Simplicity is become a very rare quality in a writer.  In the decline of great kingdoms, and where refinement in all the arts is carried to an excess, I suppose it is always so.  The later Roman writers are remarkable for false ornament; they were without doubt greatly admired by the readers of their own day; and with respect to authors of the present era, the popular among them appear to me to be equally censurable on the same account.  Swift and Addison were simple.

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THOMAS DE QUINCEY

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Thomas de Quincey, scholar, essayist, critic, opium-eater, was born at Manchester on August 15, 1785.  A singularly sensitive and imaginative boy, De Quincey rapidly became a brilliant scholar, and at fifteen years of age could speak Greek so fluently as to be able, as one of his masters said, “to harangue an Athenian mob.”  He wished to go early to Oxford, but his guardians objecting, he ran away at the age of seventeen, and, after wandering in Wales, found his way to London, where he suffered privations