Sir Thomas More.—­God is above—­but the devil is below.  Evil principles are, in their nature, more active than good.  The harvest is precarious, and must be prepared with labour, and cost, and care; weeds spring up of themselves, and flourish and seed whatever may be the season.  Disease, vice, folly, and madness are contagious; while health and understanding are incommunicable, and wisdom and virtue hardly to be communicated!  We have come, however, to some conclusion in our discourse.  Your notion of the improvement of the world has appeared to be a mere speculation, altogether inapplicable in practice; and as dangerous to weak heads and heated imaginations as it is congenial to benevolent hearts.  Perhaps that improvement is neither so general nor so certain as you suppose.  Perhaps, even in this country there may be more knowledge than there was in former times and less wisdom, more wealth and less happiness, more display and less virtue.  This must be the subject of future conversation.  I will only remind you now, that the French had persuaded themselves this was the most enlightened age of the world, and they the most enlightened people in it—­the politest, the most amiable, and the most humane of nations—­and that a new era of philosophy, philanthropy, and peace, was about to commence under their auspices, when they were upon the eve of a revolution which, for its complicated monstrosities, absurdities, and horrors, is more disgraceful to human nature than any other series of events in history.  Chew the cud upon this, and farewell

COLLOQUY III.—­THE DRUIDICAL STONES.—­VISITATIONS OF PESTILENCE.

Inclination would lead me to hibernate during half the year in this uncomfortable climate of Great Britain, where few men who have tasted the enjoyments of a better would willingly take up their abode, if it were not for the habits, and still more for the ties and duties which root us to our native soil.  I envy the Turks for their sedentary constitutions, which seem no more to require exercise than an oyster does or a toad in a stone.  In this respect, I am by disposition as true a Turk as the Grand Seignior himself; and approach much nearer to one in the habit of inaction than any person of my acquaintance.  Willing however, as I should be to believe, that anything which is habitually necessary for a sound body, would be unerringly indicated by an habitual disposition for it, and that if exercise were as needful as food for the preservation of the animal economy, the desire of motion would recur not less regularly than hunger and thirst, it is a theory which will not bear the test; and this I know by experience.