Page:Moral Pieces in Prose and Verse.pdf/81

 and insinuation "stole the hearts of the men of Israel." If those who possess real goodness are sometimes too neglectful of its exterior graces, those who are conscious of radical defects usually study and practise, with the greatest success, the innumerable arts of insinuation. The exterior graces, therefore, which attract and dazzle the eye, imply no internal excellence, and offer no solid foundation for esteem or confidence. Neither from the talents of others, are we to estimate their real worth in the scale of existence. The knowledge of what is good, does not always lead to the practice of it; and the power of doing well is sometimes neglected or perverted. Those whom brilliancy of genius or solidity of learning might have qualified to instruct and to bless man kind, have sometimes exerted them only to conceal or to gild the deformity of vice; to put darkness instead of light; to untwist the strongest bands of society; to undermine the foundations of virtue, and to wrest from their fellow men the hopes of immortality.

The records of ambition and infidelity are darkened with such examples. Their steps have been marked with the tears of the oppressed, the miseries of the deluded, and the blood of many victims. They have passed through life as terrors to the living, and sunk among the dead while none lamented them. Others, whom nature had