530 WASTED ARGUMENTATION. Even so Byron, when Leigh Hunt defended his poetical style, as written "upon system," said no more: for, "when a man talks of system, his case is hopeless." And in much the same spirit a Saturday Reviewer said of a distinguished Oxford Professor, "It is an act of condescension to argue at all with a man who can only write in a scream." Quite a different sort of controversialist it was that provoked the remark from the same quarter, how useless it is to attempt to talk a man into a belief in truth, or principle, or honour, who frankly avows that he regards them as elegant superfluities. “It would be about as hopeful a task to argue a Scotch political economist into poetry or love." It is no use discussing the flavour of grapes with an Esquimaux, or disputing with a native of Timbuctoo on the properties of ice. Mrs. Oliphant somewhere gives utterance to the exclamation, that surely of all incomprehensible entities, the most amazing is a fool-a creature insensate, unreasoning, upon whom neither argument nor fact can make any impression. Not much better appears King George the Third to have been in the estimate of our great Whig historian, when discussing the coronation oath: "To argue with him was impossible. Dundas tried to explain the matter, but was told to keep his Scotch metaphysics to himself." Chesterfield observes, in one of his miscellaneous pieces, that a difference in opinion, though in the merest trifles (not that the coronation oath was one), alienates little minds, especially of high rank; and of such he adds, finished courtier and man of the world as he was, that it is impossible to inform, but very easy to displease them. His pearls he kept for other purposes and other persons. He had no fancy for seeing his pearls trampled upon; still less for being himself, as the sequel, turned upon, and rent, or rended. XLVIII. AN EYE WITH A BEAM, AND AN EYE FOR A TH MOTE. St. Luke vi. 41, 42.* HE diction of proverbs is often purposely extravagant, and affects a sort of converse reductio ad absurdum, substituting for reduction a rule of addition or multiplication on a monstrous scale. A beam of wood in the eye of a man, is nearly as fantastic a supposition as a camel threading his way through that of a needle. But the big beam of wood does excellent service by way of contrast to the little mote, or, as it might be rendered, splinter,-a rendering analogous to the previous figure of speech; a bulky plank, or rafter, or beam, in the one clause of the proverb, and a mere splinter of the same wood in the second. A beam, plank, or rafter in the eye, were that possible, -and in proverbs all things are possible,—is not calculated to improve the eyesight. The bulk of it is an objection; to see at all, the eye must see over it, across it, or round some corner of it, how it may; for the opaque density of such a cubic mass of matter is decidedly against it as a transparent medium. He must be clairvoyant indeed to whom such a medium were serviceable. Nevertheless, there are people who, by hypothesis, in the proverb, are able to see through it, if not see all the better for it. All laws of optics notwithstanding, they see through the massive beam in their own eye, and in spite of it, if not indeed by means of it, detect, discern, demon * For a previous chapter of illustrations of the corresponding passage in St. Matthew, see pp. 187-191 of the First Series of Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts. 532 AN EYE WITH A BEAM strate, and denounce the tiny splinter that lurks in the eye of a brother. The beam acts as a magnifying glass, and the splinter is magnified accordingly. They see through that glass darkly; but the darkness is not to them a darkness that may be felt. The light that is in them is darkness, and how great is that darkness! Yet to themselves they seem to revel in the brightest of daylight, while their brother gropes among the shadows of night. They are fain to help the poor creature. They would like to operate forthwith upon that inflamed eye of his, and pluck out the irritating splinter. Nowhere perhaps is there a keener eye for a splinter than an eye with a plank in it. The eye with a beam within is the very eye for a mote without. It can see clearly to cast it out at a moment's notice, and dearly it longs to do so; for the beam cannot abide the mote; the splinter is an eyesore to the plank. It takes a long time to learn by heart so as to take to heart Archbishop Whately's maxim, or pensée, that ten thousand of the greatest faults in our neighbours, are of less consequence to us than one of the smallest in ourselves. Elsewhere he says, "Never is the mind less fitted for self-examination, than when most occupied in detecting the faults of others." Have you never, asks Ellesmere, found the critic disclose four errors on his own part for one that he delights to point out in the sayings or doings of the person he criticizes? Shakspeare's Biron claims the right to ask his companions, noble and royal alike, Dumain, Longueville, and the king of Navarre, addressing them singly and collectively,— "But are you not ashamed? nay, are you not, All three of you, to be thus much o'ershot? You found his mote; the king your mote did see; But I a beam do find in each of three." AND AN EYE FOR A MOTE. 533 Who, exclaims Juvenal, can stand hearing the Gracchi complaining of sedition? Quis tulerit Gracchos de seditione querentes? Even Benvolio is thus taken to task by Mercutio: "What eye, but such an eye, would spy out such a quarrel? Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat; and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg, for quarrelling." The raven chides blackness, quoth Ulysses, in Troilus and Cressida ; and "He'll be physician that should be the patient," Agamemnon adds. This is all in ridicule of Ajax, who protests, "I do hate a proud man, as I hate the engendering of toads," and yet he loves himself, is the aside of Ulysses; is it not strange? When Gloster tells King Henry, "Thy son I killed for his presumption," the retort is obvious: "Hadst thou been killed when first thou didst presume, thou hadst not lived to kill a son of mine." Clodius accusat machos, the proverb has it: an equivalent in terms to, The devil rebukes sin. An accuser should always, as Plautus puts it, enter an appearance with clean hands: "Qui alterum incusat probri eum ipsum se intueri oportet." The glass-house tenant should be shy of stone-throwing. When the archbishop, in Landor's Siege of Ancona, has his fling at the consul in the words, "Thus we teach the proud their duty," the consul rejoins, Let the lame man teach the lame To walk, the blind man teach the blind to see." Plutarch observes of the letters full of bitterest invective which passed between Otho and Vitellius, that well-grounded though their mutual reproaches might be, and indeed were, it was absurd for the one to insult the other with what might with equal justice be objected to both; for their charges were of prodigality, effeminacy, incapacity for war, previous poverty and unbounded indebtedness-points wherein it were hard to say which of 534 CORRUPT ASSAILANTS OF CORRUPTION. them had the advantage. The pot called the kettle black, and the kettle had a tu quoque right of reply. Gibbon says of the chagan of the Avars, Baian, who affected to complain of the insincerity of the Greeks, that this barbarian prince was at least a match for the most civilized nations in the refinement of dissimulation and perfidy. Philip the Fair denouncing the cruelties and tyranny of the Inquisition, and issuing his ordinance against an Office that tortured into false admissions of guilt, and suborned false witnesses where confession of guilt was not to be extorted by torture, is an edifying study, remembering that Philip was the king who so cruelly seized and tortured the Templars. "Of lawless force shall lawless Mars complain?" is the upbraiding query of Homer's indignant Jove. Bolingbroke inveighed against corrupt assailants of political corruption, as men that "must have fronts of brass, and deserve all the indignation that is due to iniquity, aggravated by impudence." Montague, accused in 1698 of peculation and greed, had the right of retort, that how his largesses had been bestowed none knew better than some of the austere patriots who harangued so loudly against his avidity. The profligate Duke of Wharton's declamation on public virtue, in 1721, is well said by Earl Stanhope-whose ancestor and namesake by title died of that speech, or at least of the excitement of his own in answering it-to have come a little strangely from the President of the Hell-fire Club. Neither patricians nor plebeians were to be taught morality by that young sprig of ignoble nobility. Wresting a couplet of Dryden's to the purpose, it might be said of him and of them, "Yet they refused (nor could he take offence) His glutton kind should teach them abstinence." Stormy was the laughter in the House when John |