Small trials-Tom Brown on prosperity-Man really dustElizabethan satirists-The grand style-Easy trials-The small ones that wear us out. ELL,' wrote the facetious but often wise Tom Brown, in his 'New Maxims of Conversation,' 'this thing call'd Prosperity makes a Man strangely insolent and for getful. How contemptibly a Cutler looks at a poor Grinder of Knives; a Physician in a coach at a Farrier afoot; and a well-known Paul's Church-yard bookseller upon one of the trade that sells second-hand books under the trees in Morefields!' We have used the capitals and italics of the facetious Mr. Thomas Brown, so as to put before the reader his own style, and to recall the tine of his writing. The observation is as old as the hills: it is very trite and commonplace. No doubt everybody knows it; but Truth has a fashion of being very old, while we have a fashion of forgetting it; so if a writer recalls old truths. in a pleasant, genial style, he is doing good. As regards trifles and little things, everything has been said that can be said. 'Sands form a mountain!' 'moments make a year.' Everything in the world depends on atoms; and so well convinced are all of us of this, that it would be waste of time to go over any instances. We are all atomical; nay, Chemistry will tell us that we are less than atoms: we are gases and vapours. Proud man is less than dust: he is a breath. His life is not worth a pin's fee: he may be deprived of it by a hair in a draught of milk, a grape-stone in a cup of wine, a grain of sand, which, Pascal tells us, caused the death of Cromwell, or a tin tack in a basin of soup, with which a year or two ago a London merchant was 'done to death.' We march upon graves: the very dust we tread upon once lived; nay, we feed upon our ancestors. The sheep that we eat may have cropped grass grown on the graves of our grandsires. The atoms of lime that enter into the composition of our bones may have filtered through water which passes through the battle graveyards of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. Trifles we are, and trifles disturb us. In the midst of prosperity, when the cutler is indeed looking down on the knife-grinder, a speck of dust in his eye will worry him, and take away the force of his proud looks. As a beau, in the days of the Regency, passed along the Old Palace Yard to one of the brilliant balls given by the Prince of Wales, he was rendered wretched for the whole evening by a mud-splash on his white silk stocking. The great author of a thousand good things, the man whose novel is sure to get praised in the Daily Jupiter,' and of whom the reviews always speak well, is ready to burst with envy when one whom he has patronised and despised rises, per saltum, over his head, and becomes a bright star in the firmament of literature. The first author, A, is the same-just as witty, just as clever, just as good; why should he fret at B? Why should the fairest belle of the ball-room, who enjoyed the dance, and was the admiration of all, be jealous of the darkest beauty to whom all eyes are turned? This trifling jealousy, so native to the hearts of authors, artists, and women--and, in good truth, women are the most strongminded and the noblest of the three-is laughable to the world, but exceedingly hurtful to themselves. Looking up to Shakspeare as we do, it is lucky for him that ignorance of all his life-doings has kept from us the envying, hatred, back-biting, lying, and slandering to which he must have been subjected, and which, perhaps, he felt and gave vent to. Thank Heaven, we do not know that he did. We know that Ben Jonson gave one or two spiteful things among the many noble ones he said |